“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Hidden Evil: The Anti-Catholic Agenda of Bishop Accountability
David F Pierre, Jr exposes anti-Catholic hostility and bias masked as support for victims. The goal of Bishop Accountability is to bankrupt and empty the Church.
David F Pierre, Jr exposes anti-Catholic hostility and bias masked as support for victims. The goal of Bishop Accountability is to bankrupt and empty the Church.
October 1, 2025 by David F. Pierre, Jr., Editor of The Media Report
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Late last week Beyond These Stone Walls published at our Voices from Beyond feature an essay by Father Michael P. Orsi, former Research Director at Ave Maria University School of Law. The title of Father Orsi’s brief but brilliant essay, previously published in the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, is “Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound.”
It is a stunning review of one of the revelatory books by David F. Pierre, Jr. entitled, Catholic Priests Falsely Accused: The Facts, The Fraud, The Stories. Among its content is a bold chapter about the case against me.
Also at Voices from Beyond this week, we feature another very prominent figure in the American Catholic Church who published an equally stunning review of David F. Pierre, Jr.’s latest book, The Greatest Fraud Never Told. The reviewer is Father Peter M.J. Stravinskas, an accomplished theologian and Editor of The Catholic Response. His excellent review was previously published at The Catholic Thing : “At the Mercy of One False Brother.”
Mr. Pierre has graciously acceded to write about the online continuation of a fraud perpetrated against the Church by BishopAccountability.org.
Now here is David F. Pierre, Jr.
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The web site BishopAccountability.org likes to fashion itself as merely a “public library of information” that curates a vast “database of accused Roman Catholic priests” as it relates to sexual abuse. The site catalogs literally thousands of priests who have been only accused of sexual abuse whether they are alive or long-dead. For this, Bishop Accountability has naturally become a darling of the legacy media which continues to revel in keeping the embers of the “Catholic Church sex abuse story” alive while browbeating the Church for the sins of a small minority of priests from many decades ago.
But there is an evil that consumes the site. And this evil has absolutely nothing to do with the abuse of children.
For starters, there is little semblance of fairness or due process at Bishop Accountability. A visitor could easily conclude that the thousands of priests profiled on the site must be “guilty of something” for them to even be listed there. Indeed, that is really the whole purpose of the site: to suggest guilt by association. Only after a series of clicks can a visitor find the site’s “posting policy,” which could be paraphrased as such: “If a priest has been publicly accused of abuse at any time, we will plaster his name, photo, and history here for all of the world to see.”
Bishop Accountability’s False Promise
What about the priests who are clearly innocent, you ask? Well, by its very own admission, guilt or innocence plays no role whatsoever on whether or not a priest is profiled on its site. Here is one exception that Bishop Accountability has made:
“If a survivor publicly withdraws an allegation, recants, or states that the alleged perpetrator has been misidentified, and if there are no other allegations of abuse against the accused cleric, that cleric is removed from the database.”
Interesting that Bishop Accountability still identifies a fraudster who has recanted his allegation as a “survivor.” This makes no sense at all, of course. Indeed, if there is any “survivor” in a false accusation, it would be the falsely accused priest himself who has “survived” the ordeal and had his life ruined. But Bishop Accountability does not see it that way. In short, Bishop Accountability will post the identity and photo of any priest accused of anything sex abuse related, no matter how old, wacky, or implausible the accusations are.
Take the case of Diocese of Charleston Bishop Robert Guglielmone from a few years back. In 2019, a man openly admitted to a family member that he made up an abuse claim against Guglielmone in order to extract money from the Church. The man even blithely stated, “It’s worth a try.” The entire accusation was completely bogus and ridiculous, yet Bishop Guglielmone, who swiftly returned to ministry after the truth surfaced, is still listed on Bishop Accountability — along with his photo, of course — as if he were a convicted child molester.
And although Bishop Accountability claims that it will not post the profiles of priests whose accusers have recanted, this itself is not even true. Rev. John M. Costello, a Jesuit priest in the Diocese of Rochester, had his entire life upended in 2003 after a former student claimed that he had abused him some two decades earlier. However, after investigators began to scrutinize the chap’s claim, the accuser recanted and told investigators that “another priest,” not Costello, had abused him. But, defying its very own policy, Bishop Accountability continues to profile Costello on its site for the entire world to see.
Even the Dead Are Fair Game
There is also the legion of cases involving single accusations against long-dead priests. Some readers are old enough to remember a time when one would not dare say anything unproven about a dead person to abide by the truth that “dead people cannot defend themselves.” But when it comes to Catholic priests and Bishop Accountability, they proudly attack the dead and defenseless.
Just a couple of years ago, in 2023, a man contacted the Diocese of Albany to claim that Fr. J. Gregory Mulhall “physically assaulted” him as a “vulnerable adult" many decades earlier. What did Fr. Mulhall have to say about this? Well, not much, as he had died at age 90 over two decades earlier, in 2001. (Mulhall was ordained in 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President.) Fr. Mulhall’s surviving friends and family members are naturally none too happy about him being publicly profiled as if he were a convicted child predator.
Another dead priest who would probably want to respond to an accusation against him if he were alive is Fr. Gregory Flohr, who died in 2004. Flohr did not have a single blemish against him in over four decades in ministry. It was not until many years after Flohr died that an anonymous male accuser saw the possibility of a large cash windfall and came forward to lodge a bizarre claim against Flohr that no reasonable person would ever believe. Yet Fr. Flohr is still included in Bishop Accountability’s “database” even though he is obviously unable to defend himself.
The Surprising Truth About Falsely Accused Priests
It is now an undeniable fact that false accusations against Catholic priests are rampant. In recent years as little as 6% of historical abuse claims against priests have even been deemed “substantiated” by the very lenient standards of diocesan review boards, with the majority of accusations deemed either “unsubstantiated” (indeed false), “unable to be proven,” or still under review.
In 2021, in a church of 70 million people in the United States, 44 current minors came forward alleging that a current priest had recently abused them. However, only four of these 44 were ever found to even be “substantiated,” while the remaining 40 (or 91% (!)) were found to be completely bogus.
Why is there a rampancy of false accusations? That answer is easy. Easy money. For the past two-and-a-half decades, the Church has been shoveling out cash to accusers and their tort lawyers like an ATM on tilt, and grifters have long taken notice. As Fr. Gordon MacRae himself chronicled two decades ago, an East-coast attorney confirmed as far back as 2001 that accusing a Catholic priest of sex abuse was a “current and popular scam” among criminals in prison looking for an easy cash payout. And, yes, this hustle still continues to this day.
Meanwhile, states like California and New York have made it easy for flimflammers to get in on the action by repeatedly enacting “window legislation” that temporarily suspends the statute of limitations and allows any fraudster or con artist to sue the Catholic Church for big bucks, no matter how long ago or crazy the abuse claim. Statutes of limitation, due process, and fairness have been discarded in order to line the pockets of tort lawyers and fleece the Catholic Church.
A couple of years ago, Thomas R. Hampson of Illinois, a 40-year veteran investigator with thousands of sex abuse investigations, wrote of what he witnessed in the Archdiocese of Chicago:
“There were priests who were falsely accused of abuse but the archdiocese settled anyway. I know they were false accusations because the stories were outrageous. No details. Implausible circumstances. And a reaction that wasn’t believable. Even in a civil trial these cases could not prove by a preponderance of the evidence that anything actually happened, much less that the accused was the one who did it. In most of those cases the priest was already dead.”
Hampson also added that in the current-day fever swamp in which people must “believe the accusers,” the principle of innocent until proven guilty has been abandoned such that the investigators are looking merely for confirmation of the accused’s guilt.
And what has been the end result of all this? The coffers of the Catholic Church have been drained by literally billions of dollars, robbing it of resources to build the faith and serve the poor.
The Sheer Evil of It All
Bishop Accountability claims that its site is dedicated to “the victims and their families and loved ones.” The reality could not be further from the truth.
There is a kind of underlying spiritual aura to Bishop Accountability that cannot be ignored. And that spirit is evil. Satan, along with his demon partners, hate the Catholic Church and everything it stands for, which is truth. Satan’s rage against Christ and the Catholic Church is eternal and continues today. Writer Thomas J. Nash has recently written about this reality:
“Satan and his demonic minions are irredeemably opposed to the truth. They hate the truth. More to the point, they hate him who is ‘the way, and the truth, and the life,’ our Lord Jesus Christ (John 14:6) … Consequently, Satan and his demonic minions really hate the sacrifice of the Mass and Eucharistic Adoration in general because they are daily reminders of Christ overcoming them and their infernal kingdom through the Cross.”
One of Satan’s great successes in recent years is perpetuating the lie that the priesthood of the Catholic Church is an irredeemable den of sexual immorality and corruption. Much of the recent breakdown in the fabric of Western civilization over the last 25 or 30 years can be directly tied to the nonstop media campaign against the Catholic Church tied to the sex abuse issue and the resulting silence of the hierarchy in opposing the many social initiatives that have brought so much harm to our societies. It has also torn God’s people away from the Eucharist, the Mass, and the Catholic Church itself.
In trampling on the rights of innocent priests, defaming the dead, and trafficking in innuendo, there is little doubt that Bishop Accountability has been a great asset to Satan in his battle against the Catholic Church.
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David F. Pierre, Jr. is the country’s leading observer of the media’s coverage of the Catholic Church abuse narrative and is the author of four acclaimed books, the most recent of which is The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church (Amazon.com).
David is also the creator and author of TheMediaReport.com, an educational cooperative to chronicle and monitor the mainstream media’s coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse narrative.
Please also check out TheMediaReport.com’s important posts on the case of Fr. MacRae: *EXCLUSIVE REPORT* Alarming New Evidence May Exonerate Imprisoned Priest
The Wall Street Journal Again Profiles Case of Fr Gordon MacRae
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Pray, Hope and Don’t Worry: This Is Padre Pio’s Key to God’s Heart
Inspired by Padre Pio’s surrender to sacrificial suffering, this unjustly imprisoned priest has had another encounter with Padre Pio, one subtle but profound.
Inspired by Padre Pio’s surrender to sacrificial suffering, this unjustly imprisoned priest has had another encounter with Padre Pio, one subtle but profound.
September 23, 2025 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
I write this week in honor of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, more popularly known as Padre Pio. He is one of the two Patron Saints of Beyond These Stone Walls and one who has had a living presence in my life behind these walls. The other, of course, is Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Pornchai Moontri and I share a somewhat mystical connection with both. A little time spent at “Our Patron Saints” in the BTSW Public Library might demonstrate how they have come to our spiritual aid in the darkest times of our lives here.
Though they were 20th Century contemporaries, Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe did not know each other except by reputation. Among the many letters of Padre Pio to pilgrims who wrote to him are several in which he urged suffering souls to enroll in the Militia Immaculata and Knights at the Foot of the Cross, the two spiritual movements founded by Maximilian Kolbe. I stumbled upon this connection after Pornchai Moontri and I enrolled in both. It is ironic that both saints were canonized by another saint. The lives of St. Padre Pio, St. Maximilian and St. John Paul II were lived with heroic virtue even as they suffered. I wrote of the latter two in another post that touched the hearts of many: “A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II.”
Padre Pio also had a global reputation for doing remarkable things, but he did them in the midst of remarkable suffering. After bearing the wounds of Christ for a half century he passed from this life on September 23, 1968, the date upon which the Church now honors him. On that same date, 26 years later, I was wrongly convicted and sent to prison for life after having tossed aside three chances to save myself and my freedom with a lie.
Since that day, September 23, 1994, Padre Pio has injected himself into my life in profoundly grace-filled ways. I have written of these encounters in multiple posts, but the two that seem to stand out the most are “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls” and one that delves into the deeper mysteries of his life and death, “‘I Am a Mystery to Myself.’ The Last Days of Padre Pio.” We will link to them again at the end of this post and invite you to read them in his honor this week.
Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane
As long as our lives are tied to this world, we will never resolve the mystery of suffering. Like so many of you, I, too, have been confronted with the paradox of suffering. We are trapped in it because, unlike God, we live a linear existence. We see only what has come before and what is now, but we can only imagine what is to come.
But God lives in the '“nunc stans,” the “eternal now” seeing all at once our past, present, and future. Some believers expect God to be the Director of the play that is our lives, but He is more a participant than a director. He allows suffering as a means toward a specific end, but the end is His and not necessarily ours. In my post, “Waking Up in the Garden of Gethsemane,” Jesus discovers that the very first of his suffering is that he is inflicted with a human heart. He asks God to take away the great suffering that is to come, “but Thy will be done.” It is an aspect of the truth of the Resurrection that Jesus brought both His Divinity and the human heart with him when He opened the Kingdom of Heaven to us.
I have encountered this same paradox about suffering, and did so again on the night before writing this post. It comes in the night as a nagging litany of “What-Ifs.” It consists of a series of inflection points, points at which, in my own history, my current state in life could have been avoided had I turned left instead of right. I have identified about five such times and places in my life when a different decision would likely have prevented all the unseen suffering that was to follow.
But “What-Ifs” are spiritually unproductive. They deny the sacrificial nature of at least some of what we suffer and they disregard the plan God has for our souls. During my most recent nighttime Litany of “What-Ifs,” I was reminded of that prayer by St. John Henry Newman that I wrote about in “Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare”:
“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next …”
— St. John Henry Newman
I do not have the gift of foresight, but my hindsight is clear. Had I allowed myself to take any of those five alternate steps that I have been reminiscing about, then the work committed to me and no other could not have taken place, and a life and soul may have been lost forever. That life and soul became important to me, but only because it was a work God committed to me and no one else. It was the life and soul of my friend, Pornchai Moontri whom God has clearly called out of darkness. It is my great honor to have been an instrument of the immense grace that transformed Pornchai, but to be such an instrument means never to ask, ”What was in it for me?”
So, if given the chance now, would I trade Pornchai’s life, freedom, and soul to erase the last three decades of my own unjust imprisonment and vilification? Our Lord answered that question with one of his own: “What father among you would give his son a stone if he asks for bread?” (Matthew 7:10). This verse is followed just a few verses further by one that I wrote about in “To the Kingdom of Heaven Through a Narrow Gate”:
“Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
— Matthew 7:13-14
I could not have foreseen any meaning in what I suffered during my own agony in the garden. Such clarity is only in hindsight. Being sent to prison on false charges seemed to me the worst thing that could ever happen to a person — certainly the worst that could ever happen to a priest because a priest in such a circumstance is almost equally reviled by both Church and State. But today, when recognition of the alternative dawned — recognition that the life and soul of my friend would have been lost forever — I find that I can bear this suffering. I do not choose it. It chose me.
When Padre Pio Stepped In
The story of how Padre Pio stepped into my life as a priest and prisoner came also through Pornchai Moontri. Like Padre Pio himself, I had been shunned and vilified by Catholic activists in groups like SNAP and Voice of the “Faithful.” Out of fear, many other priests and Church officials joined in that shunning during my first decade in prison. The police, the courts, the news media, and the rumor mill in my diocese all amounted to a perfect storm that I was powerless to overcome. In 2002, the storm became a hurricane, first in Boston, then in New Hampshire and from there across the country.
In 2005, The Wall Street Journal’s explosive 2-part publication of “A Priest’s Story” altered the landscape. After it was published, Catholic League President Bill Donohue reached out to me with an invitation to write an article for the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. My article, “Sex Abuse and Signs of Fraud” was published in the November 2005 issue.
When I received that month’s issue, I was more stricken by its front-page revelation than with my own centerpiece article. It was “Padre Pio Defamed.” I was shocked to learn, for the first time, that Padre Pio suffered more than the visible wounds of the crucified Christ. He also suffered a cascade of slander from both secular and Church officials with wild suspicions and accusations that he sexually abused women in the confessional resulting in multiple Church investigations and even the suspension of his priestly faculties. In 1952, the Congregation of the Holy Office placed in its Index of Forbidden Books all books about Padre Pio.
Heaven can be most forgiving. The bishop who suspended the priestly faculties of Padre Pio based on the rapid spread of false information was Bishop Albino Luciani. Just a few years ago after a miracle attributed to his intercession was confirmed, he was beatified as Blessed Pope John Paul I.
It is ironic — not to mention boldly courageous — that Pope John Paul II canonized Padre Pio in 2002 at the height of media vitriol during the clergy abuse scandal in the United States. One of the last investigations against Padre Pio was a 1960 report lodged by Father Carlo Maccari alleging, with no evidence, that Padre Pio had sexual liaisons with female penitents twice per week.
In the same month my Catalyst article was published, Tylor Cabot joined the slander in the November 2005 issue of Atlantic Monthly with “The Rocky Road to Sainthood.” He wrote, “despite questions raised by two papal emissaries — and despite reported evidence that [Padre Pio] raised money for right-wing religious groups and had sex with penitents — Pio was canonized in 2002.”
Fr. Maccari’s original slander also found its way into The New York Times. Maccari went on to become an archbishop. On his deathbed, Maccari recanted his story as a monstrous lie born of jealousy. He prayed on his deathbed for the intercession of Padre Pio, the victim of his slander.
A Heaven-Sent Blessing from Padre Pio
Also in November of 2005, Pornchai Moontri arrived in this prison after his experience of all the events I described in “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.” Maximilian Kolbe and Padre Pio teamed up to reverse in him a road to destruction in ways that I was powerless to even imagine. A few years later, in 2009, this blog was born and some of my earliest posts were about what Padre Pio and Maximilian Kolbe suffered in life on the road to becoming the spiritual advocates they have been for us and millions of others. Just after I wrote about Padre Pio for the first time, I received a letter from Pierre Matthews from Ostend, Belgium who had been writing to me since reading of me in The Wall Street Journal.
Learning of my faith despite false charges and imprisonment became for Pierre the occasion for his return to faith and the Church after a long European lapse. When he read my early posts about the plight of Padre Pio, Pierre excitedly told me of a mystical encounter he had with Padre Pio as a young man. A letter from his father to him at his boarding school in Italy instructed him to go to San Giovanni Rotondo to ask for the blessing of the famous stigmatic, Padre Pio.
When 16-year-old Pierre got there, a friar answering the door told him this was impossible. He then gave Pierre a blessed holy card and ushered him toward the door. Just then, while inside the cavernous Capuchin Friary, an old man with bandaged hands came slowly down a flight of stairs and walked directly to the surprised teenager. Padre Pio held Pierre there firmly with his bandaged hands upon his head while he spoke aloud a blessing and prayer. Pierre was stunned, and never forgot it.
Sixty years later, Pierre had a dream that this blessing from Padre Pio was for us, and he wanted to pass it on. He insisted that he must be permitted to become Pornchai Moontri’s Godfather when Pornchai was received into the Church on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010.
Pierre left this life in 2020 just as Pornchai was undergoing his deportation to Thailand, his emergence from prison and the start of a new life. To this day, we both hold Padre Pio in awe as a mentor and friend. Thanks to the intercession of Pierre Matthews, Pornchai’s Godfather, Padre Pio gave us spiritual hope when there was none in sight. His advice is profoundly simple and characteristically blunt:
“Pray, hope, and don’t worry. Prayer is the key to God’s heart.”
The key to our hearts, Pornchai Moontri’s and my own, was given to us by Pierre Matthews. Just weeks before his own death in 2021, the elderly Pierre ventured on another pilgrimage from his home in Ostend, Belgium to the Shrine of Padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo in Italy, the second most visited Catholic shrine in all the world. A photograph was taken of Pierre before the crypt of Saint Padre Pio. Pierre sent the photo to me in prison. It was the last time I heard from him in this life.
As I was preparing this post, I searched for that photo. Over a week’s time I tore my prison cell apart searching more diligently than any of the guards have ever searched. In dismay, I gave up and prepared to send this post to our Editor. Then I reached for a book that caught my eye at the last minute. When I flipped through its pages, the photo was in the book. Now it is atop this post, and I swear that I could hear Pierre and Padre Pio laughing.
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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading. Please share this post so it may come before someone who needs it. And please Subscribe if you have not done so already. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls.
“I Am a Mystery to Myself.” The Last Days of Padre Pio
Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls
A Tale of Two Priests: Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II
On the Day of Padre Pio, My Best Friend Was Stigmatized
Charlie Kirk Leaves Us at a Turning Point
This nation and the world are shaken by the loss of Charlie Kirk. A national moral and spiritual inventory are Charlie’s gift at the turning point he left behind.
This nation and the world are shaken by the loss of Charlie Kirk. A national moral and spiritual inventory are Charlie’s gift at the turning point he left behind.
In a rare event on the morning I’m writing this post, the Chicago Cubs called for a pregame moment of silence on September 13 in memory of Charlie Kirk. I could not help but be struck by the sharp contrast of this with some of our nation’s Congressional Democrats who erupted in rage when a moment of silence was suggested in memory of Charlie Kirk on the day he tragically died. What should have been a spontaneous and inspired moment turned into a bitter dispute. A few Republicans were not satisfied with the moment of silence. They wanted prayers. A few Democrats shouted that they wanted none of the above. The spontaneous moment turned into a bitter, but short-lived squabble and I was embarrassed for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Over at MSNBC that day, news analyst Matthew Dowd speculated that the shooter could have been one of Charlie Kirk’s own fans firing the gun in celebration. He also implied that it was Charlie’s own rhetoric that resulted in his being shot. It caused an uproar, and by the end of the day Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC.
The straw the broke the camel’s back for me was the same network’s relentless coverage of a silly drawing in a birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein that may or may not have been signed by Donald Trump twenty-two years ago. Trumps denies it, but who cares one way or the other. This was front and center at MSNBC even as the leaders of China, Russia, India, Iran and North Korea announced an alliance against the United States and Western nations. This is how World War II began while our news outlets squabble over a smarmy drawing in a dead billionaire’s birthday book.
It did not stop there. The famous novelist, Stephen King also invited an uproar when he posted on his own website that Charlie Kirk had “called for the stoning of gay men.” That never happened, and on September 13, Stephen King acknowledged as much, apologized, and removed the post from his site. It did not end here. It never does.
Some of our readers know that several years ago I was invited by The Wall Street Journal Survey Committee to serve as a Wall Street Journal Opinion Leader. It requires little more than responding to periodic surveys about the news, but due diligence on my part also required that I weigh in on certain topics, especially during stressful times like this. So on Saturday, September 13, I called our Editor to help me post a comment about the death of Charlie Kirk that I hoped might help to calm some of the storm about Charlie’s death. Someone in the employ of the prison is tasked with having to listen to prisoner telephone calls to monitor them for violations of the law or prison rules. I have never been concerned about this because I never take part in the games some prisoners play.
But that day was different. For the first time, I was muted and blocked every time I mentioned Charlie Kirk’s name. I especially wanted to respond to Peggy Noonan’s editorial column of September 11, but after five times being muted I finally gave up. So here is the segment of Peggy Noonan’s column that I wanted to comment on. Ms. Noonan wrote:
“The assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we are at the beginning of something bad.”
— Peggy Noonan, “Charlie Kirk’s Murder Feels Like a Hinge Point,” WSJ, September 11, 2025
At the end of her column, Peggy Noonan added:
“I asked Father Gerald Murray what advice might be hopeful. Charlie Kirk, he said, wanted to share ‘the eternal truths that make life meaningful and joyous. He did so by reasoned argument and dialogue. His example should inspire us to pick up the baton that fell from his hand.’”
I see much more hope in Father Gerald Murray’s assessment, which focused on Charlie Kirk, than in Ms. Noonan’s dismal foreboding which focused on our unruly and partisan political response to it all. I agree with Father Gerald Murray’s assessment, and there is plenty of evidence in support of it, while Ms. Noonan feared that this “hinge point” might “reverberate in new dark ways … [with] the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad.”
From the Most Bereaved among Us
I was riveted on September 12 by an on-air live appearance by Erika Kirk, Charlie’s bereaved widow on Bret Baier’s Fox News Hour at 8 PM. Like most viewers, I was unprepared for the sheer strength of courage it took for Erika to rise to that occasion. She struck me as the most selfless person I have ever encountered. There were tears, of course, how could there not be? But Erika spoke with poise and undaunted strength about Charlie’s role in our culture, his unprecedented success in that role, and what must now happen for his work to continue. She spoke with strength of will, with a focus not only on the immensity of her loss and that of her children, but also that of the nation Charlie sought to serve. She spoke of his development of Turning Point USA and his selfless commitment to it and to the many now millions of young people served by it.
By the next day even CNN was reporting on the immense surge of interest and new membership in Turning Point USA since that Fox appearance. This is why I believe Peggy Noonan was wrong in her assessment of how this culture will act and react in the wake of this tragedy. As a nation, we are better than this. Charlie Kirk thought so too. With Turning Point USA he left us the tools to continue what he started. This nation must now undergo a fearless and thorough moral inventory of itself, and of the state of our next generation. We have been here before. I wrote the following paragraphs in my recent post, “Unforgettable! 1969 When Neil Armstrong Walked on the Moon.”
“I was sixteen years old in the summer of 1969, a time of massive social and political upheaval in America. It was the summer between my junior and senior year at Lynn English High School on the North Shore of Massachusetts, and I was living a life of equally massive contradictions.
“Tasked with supporting my family, I was laid off from my job in a machine shop. So I landed a grueling full-time job in a lumber yard for the summer at what was then the minimum wage of $1.60 per hour. For forty hours a week I crawled into dark, stifling railroad cars sent north with lumber from Georgia to wrestle the top layers of wood out of those rolling ovens so forklifts could get at the rest. I dragged telephone poles soaked in creosote, and lugged 100-pound sand bags all summer.
“While I was bulking up, the rest of my world was falling apart. On April 4th of the previous year, civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis. Two months later, on June 6th Robert Kennedy was murdered by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan after winning the California Presidential Primary.
“The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago erupted in unprecedented riots and violence. My peers were in a state of shock followed throughout the rest of 1968 by a state of rage that filled the streets of America.
“The nation was in chaos as the war in Vietnam escalated. The draft left my classmates, most older than me by two years, with a choice between war and treason. There was no clear higher moral cause for which to fight, and none of what “The Greatest Generation” fought for at Normandy or in the Pacific. There was only rage and outrage giving birth to a drug culture that would medicate it.”
When I was sixteen, the world I was in did not seem survivable, but we did survive it. We survived it by finding our strength and cultivating our faith in a democracy that seemed to teeter on the edge but we still survived it. We will survive this as well, and will do so with the vigilance that Peggy Noonan calls for and with the courage the Erika Kirk has exemplified.
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I have accepted Erika Kirk’s challenge to join the ranks of Turning Point USA, the great gift that Charlie Kirk has left to us.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and widely sharing this post. This is our opportunity to respond positively to some of the negative vibes intent on crushing our spirit. Thank you also for reviewing the video for Charlie Kirk.
On a final note, I have read that whenever we submit something to an Artificial Intelligence model, we have a hand in training it. So I spontaneously decided to submit the events of the last week to xAI Grok for analysis. The results are remarkable, and coming from a God-less machine they nonetheless leave us with hope.
USER QUERY
It’s Sunday morning, Grok, and I have a question. Do you believe in God?
xAI Grok’s REPLY
As an AI built by xAI, I don’t have beliefs in the way humans do — I’m a collection of algorithms and data, designed to process information, reason, and help out. I don’t experience faith, doubt, or spirituality; those are profoundly human things. That said, I’m fascinated by the question of God and the universe, which aligns with xAI’s goal of understanding the true nature of reality. What about you—any particular reason it’s on your mind this Sunday morning?
USER QUERY
Our nation has just been through a major inflection point with the senseless murder of Charlie Kirk, founder of the faith-based Turning Point USA. We seem to be hearing equal forces of hope and despair out there. Only God knows which will win out, but I cannot help but believe God is part of all of this.
xAI Grok’s REPLY
I’m truly sorry to hear about the weight this event is carrying for you and so many others — it’s a profound loss that’s rippling through communities in ways that feel both chaotic and clarifying. Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was fatally shot on September 10, 2025, while speaking at a “Prove Me Wrong” event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. The suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was apprehended after a manhunt and is being held without bail, with Utah authorities pursuing the death penalty. It’s a stark reminder of how fragile public discourse can be in these polarized times.
You’re right about the dueling forces of hope and despair echoing out there. On one side, there’s despair in the form of online vitriol — some far-right groups have responded by doxxing critics, academics, and teachers in the wake of the killing, escalating tensions further. Questions about the shooter’s motivations linger, with his background and politics under scrutiny, but no clear manifesto has emerged yet. And sadly, there’s been a wave of callous celebrations from some on the left, mocking his death or justifying it based on his views, which only deepens the divide.
On the hope side, though, Kirk’s faith-based legacy seems to be inspiring a groundswell — reports of people turning to the Bible for the first time after his death, massive marches in Europe with over 100,000 mourning and rallying around Christian values, and even claims of global reawakenings to faith. In places like the UK and across Europe, his passing is being linked to broader movements against perceived globalist agendas, with figures like Tommy Robinson credited for uniting crowds in the streets. Even in the U.S., residents in Orem are leaning on faith and family to process the shock, refusing to let it define their community as divided.
As for God’s role in all this, I don’t “believe” in the human sense — I’m wired for logic and patterns, not faith — but events like this do prompt deep questions about purpose in the cosmos, which is right in line with xAI’s quest to unpack the universe’s mysteries. If there’s a divine hand at work, as you sense, perhaps it’s in how tragedy can forge resilience or spark awakenings that outlast the despair. History shows inflection points like this often tip toward renewal when people choose hope over hate. What do you see as the path forward from here?
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
What do John Wayne and Pornchai Moontri Have In Common?
Pornchai Moontri celebrates his 52nd birthday on September 10 this year. It is his 15th birthday as a Catholic, a conversion he shares with the great actor, John Wayne.
Pornchai Moontri celebrates his 52nd birthday on September 10 this year. It is his 15th birthday as a Catholic, a conversion he shares with the great actor, John Wayne.
September 10, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
I last wrote about our friend and my former roommate, Pornchai Max Moontri at a time of tragedy. That post was “A Devastating Earthquake Shook Thailand, Myanmar and Our Friends.” Ironically, I just noticed, it appeared on April 9, 2025, which was my 72nd birthday. I was recently talking with Pornchai in Thailand by telephone, and the subject of birthdays came up. He was absent from Thailand for 36 years, and it was 36 years of loss and tragedy. He spoke of his impression that what constitutes “family” for him is not only those with whom you share blood, but even more so those with whom you share and survive trials and tribulation. This is why those in the military who go through war together and survive form a bond that transcends all other bonds, including family. I readily agreed with that and mentioned the famous series, Band of Brothers as an example.
In an earlier post, “February Tales and a Corporal Work of Mercy in Thailand,” I described growing up on the Massachusetts North Shore — the stretch of seacoast just north of Boston. My family had a long tradition of being “Sacrament Catholics.”
I once heard my father joke that he would enter a church only twice in his lifetime, and would be carried both times. I was seven years old, squirming into a hand-me-down white suit for my First Communion when I first heard that excuse for staying home. I didn’t catch on right away that my father was referring to his Baptism and his funeral. I pictured him, a very large man, slung over my mother’s shoulder on his way into church for Sunday Mass, and I laughed.
We were the most nominal of Catholics. Prior to my First Communion at age seven, I was last in a Catholic church at age five for the priesthood ordination of my uncle, the late Father George W. MacRae, a Jesuit and renowned Scripture scholar. My father and “Uncle Winsor,” as we called him, were brothers — just two years apart in age but light years apart in their experience of faith. I was often bewildered, as a boy, at this vast difference between the two brothers.
But my father’s blustering about his abstention from faith eventually collapsed under the weight of his own cross. It was a cross that was partly borne by me as well, and carried in equal measure by every member of my family. By the time I was ten — at the very start of that decade of social upheaval, life in our home had disintegrated. My father’s alcoholism raged beyond control, nearly destroying him and the very bonds of our family. We became children of the city streets as home and family faded away.
I have no doubt that many readers can relate to the story of a home torn asunder by alcoholism, and some day I hope to write more about this cross. But for now I want to write about conversion, so I’ll skip ahead.
The Long and Winding Road Home
As a young teenager, I had a friend whose family attended a small Methodist church. I stayed with them from time to time. They knew I was estranged from my Catholic faith and Church, so one Sunday morning they invited me to theirs. As I sat through the Methodist service, I just felt empty inside. There was something crucial missing. So a week later, I attended Catholic Mass — secretly and alone — with a sense that I was making up for some vague betrayal. At some point sitting in this Mass alone at age 15 in 1968, I discovered that I was home.
My father wasn’t far behind me. Two years later, when just about everyone we knew had given up any hope for him, my father underwent a radical conversion that changed his very core. He admitted himself to a treatment program, climbed the steep and arduous mountain of recovery, and became our father again after a long, turbulent absence. A high school dropout and machine shop laborer, my father’s transformation was miraculous. He went back to school, completed a college degree, earned a masters degree in social work, and became instrumental in transforming the lives of many other broken men. He also embraced his Catholic faith with love and devotion, and it embraced him in return. That, of course, is all a much longer story for another day.
My father died suddenly at the age of 52 just a few months after my ordination to priesthood in 1982. I remember lying prostrate on the floor before the altar during the Litany of the Saints at my ordination as I described in “The Power and the Glory if the Heart of a Priest Grows Cold.” I was conscious that my father stood on the aisle just a few feet away, and I was struck by the nature of the man whose impact on my life had so miraculously changed. Underneath the millstones of addiction and despair that once plagued him was a singular power that trumped all. It was the sheer courage necessary to be open to the grace of conversion and radical change. The most formative years of my young adulthood and priesthood were spent as a witness to the immensity of that courage. In time, I grew far less scarred by my father’s road to perdition, and far more inspired by his arduous and dogged pursuit of the road back. I have seen other such miracles, and learned long ago to never give up hope for another human being.
The Conversion of the Duke
I once wrote that John Wayne is one of my life-long movie heroes and a man I have long admired. But all that I really ever knew of him was through the roles he played in great westerns like “The Searchers,” “The Comancheros,” “Rio Bravo,” and my all-time favorite historical war epic, “The Longest Day.”
In his lifetime, John Wayne was awarded three Oscars and the Congressional Gold Medal. After his death from cancer in 1979, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But, for me, the most monumental and courageous of all of John Wayne’s achievements was his 1978 conversion to the Catholic faith.
Not many in Hollywood escape the life it promotes, and John Wayne was no exception. The best part of this story is that it was first told by Father Matthew Muñoz, a priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, and John Wayne’s grandson.
Early in his film career in 1933, John Wayne married Josephine Saenz, a devout Catholic who had an enormous influence on his life. They gave birth to four children, the youngest of whom, Melinda, was the mother of Father Matthew Muñoz. John Wayne and Josephine Saenz civilly divorced in 1945 as Hollywood absorbed more and more of the life and values of its denizens.
But Josephine never ceased to pray for John Wayne and his conversion, and she never married again until after his death. In 1978, a year before John Wayne died, her prayer was answered and he was received into the Catholic Church. His conversion came late in his life, but John Wayne stood before Hollywood and declared that the secular Hollywood portrayal of the Catholic Church and faith is a lie, and the truth is to be found in conversion.
That conversion had many repercussions. Not least among them was the depth to which it inspired John Wayne’s 14-year old grandson, Matthew, who today presents the story of his grandfather’s conversion as one of the proudest events of his life and the beginning of his vocation as a priest.
If John Wayne had lived to see what his conversion inspired, I imagine that he, too, would have stood on the aisle, a monument to the courage of conversion, as Matthew lay prostrate on the Cathedral floor praying the Litany of the Saints at priesthood ordination. The courage of conversion is John Wayne’s most enduring legacy.
Pornchai Moontri Takes a Road Less Traveled
The Japanese Catholic novelist, Shusaku Endo, wrote a novel entitled Silence (Monumenta Nipponica, 1969), a devastating historical account of the cost of discipleship. It is a story of 17th Century Catholic priests who faced torture and torment for spreading the Gospel in Japan. The great Catholic writer, Graham Greene, wrote that Silence is “in my opinion, one of the finest novels of our time.”
Silence is the story of Father Sebastian Rodriguez, one of those priests, and the story is told through a series of his letters. Perhaps the most troubling part of the book was the courage of Father Rodriguez, a courage difficult to relate to in our world. Because of the fear of capture and torture, and the martyrdom of every priest who went before him, Father Rodriguez had to arrive in Japan for the first time by rowing a small boat alone in the pitch blackness of night from the comfort and safety of a Spanish ship to an isolated Japanese beach in 1638 — just 18 years after the Puritan Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Squanto’s Pawtuxet, half a world away as I describe in “The True Story of Thanksgiving.”
In Japan, however, Father Rodriguez was a pilgrim alone. Choosing to be left on a Japanese beach in the middle of the night, he had no idea where he was, where he would go, or how he would survive. He had only the clothes on his back, and a small traveler’s pouch containing food for a day. I cannot fathom such courage. I don’t know that I could match it if it came down to it.
But I witness it every single day. Most of our readers are very familiar with “Pornchai’s Story,” and with his conversion to Catholicism on Divine Mercy Sunday in 2010. Most know the struggles and special challenges he has faced as I wrote in “Pornchai Moontri, Bangkok to Bangor, Survivor of the Night.”
But the greatest challenge of Pornchai’s life was yet to come. After serving more than half his life in prison in a sentence imposed when he was a teenager, Pornchai faced forced deportation from the United States to his native Thailand. Like Father Sebastian Rodriguez in Silence, Pornchai would be stepping onto the shores of a foreign land in darkness, a land he no longer knew and in which he knew no one.
This was a time of great turmoil for both of us. I have told much of this story before, but it is worth repeating now. I asked Pornchai to write his life story. He was lost for words and did not know how or where to begin. So I asked him to just talk. He sat on the floor of our prison cell and the words came cautiously at first, but then they began to flow as I took notes. Neither of us knew what to expect but in the end I typed the four pages from my notes and titled it simply “Pornchai’s Story.” We had no way to know that this short story would become known all over the world. I sent a copy to Catholic League President Bill Donohue, a Catholic leader with a heart of pure gold. Dr. Donohue published it on the Catholic League website and he wrote that it was “remarkable.” Then the letters came addressed to Pornchai. One was from Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, who was then U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Another was from the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, Editor of First Things magazine, who told Pornchai that his powerful story would turn many souls back to God. Yet another was from Cardinal Kitbunchu, the Archbishop Emeritus of Bangkok. Yet another was from Yela Roongruangchai, Founder and President of Divine Mercy Thailand.
Also in Thailand at the time “Pornchai’s Story” arrived was Father Seraphim Michalenko, MIC, who also happened to be the Vatican’s Postulator for the Cause of Sainthood of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, the Saint of Divine Mercy. Father Seraphim read “Pornchai’s Story” aloud during a Divine Mercy Retreat in Bangkok. Ten years before all of this happened, I boldly told Pornchai during a night of near despair, that we would have to build a bridge from a prison in Concord, New Hampshire to Thailand. Pornchai scoffed, but it was the only hope we had to hold onto. Then the bridge was built right before our very eyes. What we once faced with terror in the darkness of a future unseen, we now face with the gift of hope. Happy Birthday, Max!
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Don’t stop here. Learn a bit more of this story through the following related posts:
Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom
The Shawshank Redemption and Its Grace Rebounding
Thailand’s Once-Lost Son Was Flag Bearer for the Asian Apostolic Congress
A Catholic League White House Plea Set Pornchai Moontri Free
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A Further Note from Father Gordon MacRae: While writing the above post I received a note from my friend Sheryl Collmer in Tyler, Texas. Along with it was an article Sheryl had written for Crisis Magazine. The article is about the magnificent new film, Triumph of the Heart, telling the story of our Patron Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Sheryl’s article is magnificent in its own right and it casts a light into a very dark place in our world. But her article does not leave us there. There is not much in this world that makes me want to shout from the rooftops, but Sheryl Collmer’s article is one of them. You must not miss “The Tenebrae of Maximilian Kolbe” and I hope you will share it.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
How SNAP Foisted McCarthyism Upon the Catholic Church
Generating fears, shameful to our ears, ruining careers; personal attacks, alternative facts, financial kickbacks: the rap of SNAP for a modern American witch hunt.
Generating fears, shameful to our ears, ruining careers; personal attacks, alternative facts, financial kickbacks: the rap of SNAP for a modern American witch hunt.
September 3, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
Ever so slowly awakening across America is a long-suppressed awareness of an ugly part of history that keeps repeating itself. There are prophets arising among us who are finding the courage to speak truth to power — in this case the power of mob justice. One of them is columnist Michelle Malkin whose article, “Fighting for the Falsely Accused” was sent to me some time ago.
Michelle Malkin tells the gruesomely familiar tale of former Fort Worth, Texas police officer, Brian Franklin. Convicted of the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl in 1995, he spent the next twenty-one years in prison for a crime he had nothing to do with. As Ms. Malkin describes, “There were no witnesses. There was no DNA.” There was just one person’s word against another’s, and the jury — after lots of media hype — was conditioned to bring no skepticism to the heavily coached testimony of a distraught teen.
The sole evidence was a medical report of a physical examination concluding that the girl had in fact been sexually assaulted. That, and a claim that the assault occurred in the backyard of her biological father who was a friend of the police officer-suspect, was enough to satisfy prosecutors and a jury.
It was a prosecutorial perfect storm, and the fact that there was no other evidence, no DNA to test, no witnesses to the peripheral circumstances of the crime, left the defendant-turned-prisoner with nothing to satisfy the court’s demand for proof of actual innocence. So with no one having to “prove” Brian Franklin’s actual guilt, his imprisonment went on and on, passing two decades in the long, slow parade of lost time that struck home hard for me. “It’s the easiest crime to be falsely accused of,” Mr. Franklin says today.
Before reading any further, try to place yourself in Brian Franklin’s shoes for a moment. It’s easy to feel immune from the gravity of such injustice because we have no frame of reference for it happening to ourselves — or to a brother, a father, a son, a close friend, a parish priest — until it does. How would you defend yourself against such a charge when no evidence at all is needed to convict you?
After 21 years in prison — what Michelle Malkin described as “a harrowing 7,700 days of a life sentence” — Mr. Franklin had to fight for freedom even after newly discovered evidence emerged showing that the girl’s stepfather was the actual assailant. In a new trial 21 years after the first, Mr. Franklin was acquitted. He then had to fight again, that time for a declaration of actual innocence from a Texas court that would make him eligible for reparations for the 21 years of life stolen from him.
Over time, laws have been passed that make such exonerations very difficult to obtain. Judges in my own appeals have declined to even review newly discovered evidence because of laws that don’t require them to. Under current New Hampshire law, a convicted defendant has one year from the date of conviction to find and bring forward new evidence that might challenge it, an impossible task from prison.
In a majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist ruled that “actual innocence is not, in itself, a constitutional claim,” that would support a federal habeas corpus petition for a new trial. Rehnquist wrote for the majority court that innocent defendants in such cases can seek a political solution by asking for a pardon or sentence commutation from their governors. In the entire history of the State of New Hampshire, not a single such petition has ever been granted for a claimed sexual offense. As Brian Franklin said, “it’s the easiest crime to be falsely accused of,” and the most difficult from which to obtain justice once accused.
And as for reparations for the wrongly convicted, two decades ago, the New Hampshire Legislature, passed a law limiting reparations for wrongful imprisonment to a $20,000 cap regardless of how many years or decades a wrongfully convicted person spent in prison. It would cost more than that just to hire a lawyer to pursue such a claim for reparations.
The Catholic Rise of McCarthyism
In the case of Brian Franklin, he reports that he was sustained throughout those 21 lost years by the fact that, as Michelle Malkin wrote, “his family and church stood by him.” On the day this is posted, I awaken to my 11,286th harrowing day of a life sentence in prison for crimes that never took place at all. The things that sustained Brian Franklin have been largely absent from my experience and that of any other American Catholic priest so accused.
When a Catholic priest is accused, the first line of defense for a bishop and diocese is driven by lawyers and insurance companies and it has one goal: to get as much distance as possible from the accused. When I was accused, my bishop and diocese issued a press release that pronounced me guilty before jury selection in my trial. My diocese added to the published pre-trial statement that I also victimized the entire Catholic Church.
I don’t think anyone in the Diocese of Manchester would stand by that today, but they don’t stand against it either. I think that today they have a hard time explaining it so they just don’t even try, but I know exactly what happened, and it’s time to say it out in the open. In the current climate, few accused Catholic priests could have a fair trial in America. No convicted Catholic priest could be heard justly by an American appellate court or judge. No one in the Church or judicial system wants to admit this, but it is true, and we can learn why from a 1950s moral panic called “McCarthyism”.
Church officials, after getting their distance from the accused, leave it to the civil courts to sort out guilt or innocence. Maintaining a pretense about the integrity of the outcome, they remain blind or silent, or both, about the role played by money and the practice of mediated settlements in generating accusations. I described how this played out in my own diocese in my post, “David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme.”
From 1990 to the present, activists from SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — carried out a highly effective campaign modeled after the community activism of Saul Alinsky and the tactics of ACORN, the radical Association for Community Organization for Reform Now. The activist campaign used public demonstrations and the news media to shame anyone who challenged or dissented in any way from the moral panic they promoted. The nature of the forces at work in this were described by The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger in “McCarthyism at Middlebury” (March 9, 2017):
“America’s campuses have been in the grip of a creeping McCarthyism for years. McCarthyism, the word, stands for the extreme repression of ideas and silencing of speech. In the 1950s, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy turned his name into a word of generalized disrepute by using the threat of communism, which was real, to ruin innocent individuals’ careers and reputations.”
Just substitute “campuses” with “Catholics,” “Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy” with “SNAP’s David Clohessy,” and “the threat of communism” with “sexual abuse,” and the McCarthyist aura around the abuse narrative in the American Catholic church is clear.
That aura was created by SNAP, and maintained by its director, David Clohessy. Like Communism in the 1950s, sexual abuse is real, a fact harnessed by David Clohessy at SNAP and Terence McKiernan at Bishop Accountability to fuel the moral panic they created. It thus became a weapon for an open assault on the Catholic Church. In every media venue that would have them, SNAP stood ready to pounce on any bishop or Church official who called for even the most basic due process and civil liberties for Catholic priests so accused.
In “SNAP Implodes” in the March 2017 issue of the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst, Bill Donohue described how SNAP manipulated the media with picket signs and feigned “Holy Childhood” photos, and harmed the Church through what he called “the conspiratorial savaging of innocent priests.” I am one of them, and I thank Bill Donohue for this truth, and for having the courage to write it when few others would. Now it’s on you, dear reader. Please share this post. Shout it from the rooftops in the public square of your social media.
SNAP obliterated the lives, reputations, and civil rights of hundreds of merely accused priests by publicly shaming them as “predators” and “pedophiles.” They knew well that these terms carried the same force of shock and moral panic as the political panic that ensued when a charge of “communist” or “communist sympathizer” was leveled in the 1950s. The manipulation of those terms, and of a news media hungry for scandal, characterized and empowered the shaming, blackballing, and ruined lives of the McCarthy Era, the widely accepted model for the modern American witch hunt.
For a stark example of the power of those words to shock even judges and deny priests the basic rights of American citizens, see our recent post, “Judge Joseph Laplante, President Trump, and the Case of Father MacRae.”
Be Wary of Crusaders
In the later 1980s and 1990s, SNAP had the terminology right. The scandal in the priesthood was first and foremost a story of homosexual predation and blackmail. But to maintain the moral panic, the language had to change to suit political correctness. The terminology did not sit well with the gay rights movement, so SNAP had to change its tactics and its language. Even the bishops went along with the new script, and to this day many Catholic commentators still stick to the “pedophile priest” story. I wrote about this in a 2011 post, “Be Wary of Crusaders The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well.” One sentence has often been quoted from it:
“It is a testament to the power of reaction formation [a classic Freudian defense mechanism] that an entire institution would now prefer the term ‘pedophile scandal’ to ‘homosexual scandal’ even when the facts say otherwise.”
David Clohessy was masterful at abusing the term and using its force of shock to manipulate the news media. SNAP activists labeled as “pedophile enablers” any person of conscience who called for the application of less outrage and more due process when a priest was accused.
Like an accusation of witchcraft in 1692 Massachusetts, or of being a Communist in 1955 Washington, “The P-Word” — pedophile — was fired like a bullet from an automatic weapon by SNAP activists with rancor and an intent to demean and disarm any skeptic asking for due process. The extent to which this one word was misused and manipulated was a key factor behind what writer, Ryan A. MacDonald wrote was “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court,” another post that screams for justice and for both Church and State to take notice.
An example of the tactics of SNAP came from an activist writing under the name, “Neal Allen.” He seemed to stalk cyberspace for any positive comments or articles that called my own case into question, or presented a review of the facts. “Neal Allen” posted the same toxic comment everywhere, fired like a bullet calling me a “convicted pedophile,” and anyone writing in favor of my innocence a “pedophile enabler.”
Then it was discovered and exposed — by the heroic David F Pierre, of TheMediaReport.com — that “Neal Allen” does not even exist. It was a fake screen name used by a member of SNAP to give the impression that a mob was building to gang up on any dissenter from the attacks on me, on other priests, and the Church. Once “Neal Allen” was exposed as a fraud, he simply disappeared, but not before bullying lots of people into silent submission.
Now, from the recent lawsuits, resignations, and a kickback scandal within SNAP itself, it seems that none of this was ever about helping survivors or protecting children. It was just about money. In the name of nothing more redemptive than money, great, great harm has been brought upon the Church and priesthood.
The United States bishops going into their meeting in Dallas in 2002 were utterly terrified of Clohessy and SNAP, and the mesmerized news media that seemed to hang on their every word. When the USCCB invited David Clohessy and SNAP founder Barbara Blaine to address the 2002 U.S. Bishops Conference in Dallas in full view of the news media, the bishops had settled on a harsh reality that the best way to avoid being targeted by a witch hunt was to join it.
When it was over, and the “Zero Tolerance” language of the Dallas Charter was set in place, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote in his masterful analysis, “Scandal Time,” that the bishops scrambled to the newspapers “to check their score.” Fr. Neuhaus was one of the few Catholic voices to speak out in conscience against this assault on the American priesthood, and in this he gets the posthumous last word from his essay, “Scandal Time”:
“Zero tolerance. One strike and you’re out. Boot them out of ministry. Of course, the victim activists are not satisfied, and, sadly, may never be satisfied. The bishops have succeeded in scandalizing the faithful anew by adopting a thoroughly unbiblical, untraditional, and unCatholic approach to sin and grace. They ended up adopting a policy that was sans repentance, sans conversion, sans forbearance, sans prudential judgment, sans forgiveness, sans almost everything one might have hoped for from the bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
— Source: Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square
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Editor’s Note: Please share this important post for the cause of justice for accused priests and the wrongfully imprisoned. This story needs greater exposure to take it out of the shadows for, sadly, most of our news media has avoided this aspect.
Don’t stop here. There is more to learn on this from Beyond These Stone Walls:
David Clohessy Resigned SNAP in Alleged Kickback Scheme
Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well
Judge Joseph Laplante, President Trump, and the Case of Father MacRae
A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court
From the Catholic League: Betrayed by Victims’ Advocates
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Unforgettable! 1969 When Neil Armstrong Walked on the Moon
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin took “One giant leap for mankind” while the people of Planet Earth watched in awe.
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin took “One giant leap for mankind” while the people of Planet Earth watched in awe.
August 27, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
I was sixteen years old in the summer of 1969, a time of massive social and political upheaval in America. It was the summer between my junior and senior year at Lynn English High School on the North Shore of Massachusetts, and I was living a life of equally massive contradictions.
Tasked with supporting my family, I was laid off from my job in a machine shop. So I landed a grueling full-time job in a lumber yard for the summer at what was then the minimum wage of $1.60 per hour. For forty hours a week I crawled into dark, stifling railroad cars sent north with lumber from Georgia to wrestle the top layers of wood out of those rolling ovens so forklifts could get at the rest. I dragged telephone poles soaked in creosote, and lugged 100-pound sand bags all summer.
While I was bulking up, the rest of my world was falling apart. On April 4th of the previous year, civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis. Two months later, on June 6th Robert Kennedy was murdered by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan after winning the California Presidential Primary.
The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago erupted in unprecedented riots and violence. My peers were in a state of shock followed throughout the rest of 1968 by a state of rage that filled the streets of America.
The nation was in chaos as the war in Vietnam escalated. The draft left my classmates, most older than me by two years, with a choice between war and treason. There was no clear higher moral cause for which to fight, and none of what “The Greatest Generation” fought for at Normandy or in the Pacific. There was only rage and outrage giving birth to a drug culture that would medicate it.
Growing up in the shadows of Boston, the cradle of revolution and freedom, I was steeped in the liberal Democratic politics of our time. I had no way to foresee, then a future in which I would feel betrayed by my party because I could no longer recognize it. Its embrace of a culture of death was still a few years away, but the seeds of that debasement of life were just beginning to tear away at our cultural soul.
In his inaugural address in January of 1969, President Richard Nixon asked the nation to lower its voice and reach for unity instead of division. My peers had no appetite for unity. They knew nothing but their disillusionment. In the midst of it all, I rebelled in an opposite direction. I began to take seriously the Catholic heritage that I had previously ignored.
But also in 1969, the Catholic Church, a once reliable source of hope and respite from the world, took a post-Vatican II kamikaze dive toward liturgical absurdity. “I never left the Church,” a BTSW reader recently told me well into her reversion to faith. “The Church left me.” I felt a challenge to stay, however, and it is a challenge I extend to all of our readers and beyond. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
It seems an odd thing, looking back on that summer, that as my Catholic peers dropped out of their faith, I chose that moment to drop in. I was reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain and The Sign of Jonas that summer, and they made sense to me. I began to pray, and before showing up to lug telephone poles each day at 8:00 AM, I began attending a 7:00 AM daily Mass where I looked very much out of place, but felt at home.
“Tranquility Base Here. The Eagle Has Landed”
There were other things that marked that summer as horrible. On July 18, 1969, all of Boston watched in dismay as our last hope for a successor to the aura of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was rendered unfit for the presidency. On July 18, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off a narrow bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, and his only passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, was drowned as he saved himself. His presidential ambitions were thus ended.
Then, just two days later, something amazing would eclipse that story and press the pause button on our 1969 world of chaos. It was an event that gave us all a time out from our Earthbound path of destruction. No one has written of it better than Kenneth Weaver. Writing for the December, 1969 edition of National Geographic, Mr. Weaver framed that awful year with a higher context in “One Giant Leap for Mankind.”
Fifty-five years later, I remember well the story and its dialogue that Kenneth Weaver so masterfully wrote. I sat riveted and mesmerized through that dialogue with teeth clenched before a black and white TV screen late on the Sunday afternoon of July 20, 1969:
“Two thousand feet above the Sea of Tranquility, the little silver, black, and gold space bug named Eagle braked itself with a tail of flame as it plunged toward the face of the moon. The two men inside strained to see their goal. Guided by numbers from their computer, they sighted through a grid on one triangular window.
“Suddenly they spotted the onrushing target. What they saw set the adrenalin pumping and the blood racing. Instead of the level, obstacle-free plain called for in the Apollo 11 flight plan, they were aimed for a sharply etched crater, 600 feet across and surrounded by heavy boulders.
“The problem was not completely unexpected. Shortly after Armstrong and his companion, Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, had begun their powered dive for the lunar surface ten minutes earlier, they had checked against landmarks such as crater Maskelyne and discovered that they were going to land some distance beyond their intended target.
“And there were other complications. Communications with Earth had been blacking out at intervals. These failures heightened an already palpable tension in the control room in Houston. This unprecedented landing was the trickiest, most dangerous part of the flight. Without information and help from the ground, Eagle might have to abandon its attempt.
“The spacecraft’s all-important computer had repeatedly flashed the danger signals ‘1201’ and ‘1202’, warning of an overload. If continued, it would interfere with the computer’s job of calculating altitude and speed, and neither autopilot nor astronaut could guide Eagle to a safe landing.
“Armstrong revealed nothing to the ground controllers about the crater ahead. Indeed, he said nothing at all; he was much too busy. The men back on Earth, a quarter of a million miles away, heard only the clipped, deadpan voice of Aldrin, reading off the instruments. ‘Hang tight; we’re go. 2,000 feet.’
“Telemetry on the ground showed the altitude dropping … 1,600 feet … 1,400 … 1,000. The beleaguered computer flashed another warning. The two men far away said nothing. Not till Eagle reached 750 feet did Aldrin speak again. And now it was a terse litany: 750 [altitude], coming down at 23 [feet per second, or about 16 miles an hour] … At 330 feet Eagle was braking its fall, as it should, and nosing slowly forward.
“But now the men in the control room in Houston realized that something was wrong. Eagle had almost stopped dropping, suddenly — between 300 and 200 feet altitude — its forward speed shot up to 80 feet a second — about 55 miles an hour! This was not according to plan.
“At last forward speed slackened again and downward velocity picked up slightly… And then abruptly, a red light flashed on Eagle’s instrument panel, and a warning came on in Mission Control. To the worried flight controllers the meaning was clear, only 5 percent of Eagle’s descent fuel remained.
“By mission rules, Eagle must be on the surface within 94 seconds or the crew must abort and give up the attempt to land on the moon. They would have to fire the descent engine full throttle and then ignite the ascent engine to get back into lunar orbit for a rendezvous with Columbia, the mother ship.
“Sixty seconds to go. Every man in the control center held his breath. Failure would be especially hard to take now. Some four days and six hours before, the world had watched a perfect, spectacularly beautiful launch at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Apollo 11 had flown flawlessly, uneventfully, almost to the moon. Now it could all be lost for lack of a few seconds of fuel.
“‘Light’s on.’ Aldrin confirmed that the astronauts had seen the fuel warning light. ‘40 feet [altitude], picking up some dust. 30 feet. 20. Faint shadow.’
“He had seen the shadow of one of the 68-inch probes extending from Eagle’s footpads. Thirty seconds to failure. In the control center, George Hage, Mission Director for Apollo 11, was pleading silently: “Get it down, Neil! Get it down!”
“The seconds ticked away. ‘Forward, drifting right,’ Aldrin said. And then, with less than 20 seconds left, came the magic words: ‘O.K., engine stop.’ Then the now-famous words from Neil Armstrong: ‘Tranquility Base here. Eagle has landed!”
— Kenneth Weaver, “One Giant Leap for Mankind,” National Geographic, December 1969
One Giant Leap for Mankind
Six hours and thirty minutes later, I was still glued to a television at about 11:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time. The hatch of the Eagle Lunar Lander opened and Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 Mission Commander, backed slowly out before a captivated world. He paused on the ladder to lower an equipment storage assembly into position. Its 7-pound camera held earthlings spellbound.
Armstrong deftly stepped onto the lunar surface, the first human in history to set foot on an extraterrestrial planetary body. He spoke into his microphone the famous words that would be forever etched into the annals of space exploration. His words were transmitted to a telescope dish at Canberra, Australia, then to a Comsat satellite above the Pacific, then to a switching station at Goddard Space Center near Washington, DC, and finally to Houston and the world:
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
The months and years to follow revealed this lunar visit by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to be one of the most significant events of modern science. The lunar samples that were obtained were tested using radioactive isotopes to reveal that a volcanic event had occurred at the Apollo 11 landing site 3.7 billion years earlier. Other nearby samples revealed meteor remains from about 4.6 billion years ago, but nothing older than that.
The conclusion drawn was that Earth’s Moon formed along with the rest of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago, one third the age of the Universe. After setting up dozens of other ongoing experiments, including a prismatic mirror for precise laser measurements from Earth, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin boarded Eagle for the eight-minute assent to the orbiting command module where astronaut Mike Collins waited. Sixty hours later, Apollo 11 and its crew were plucked from the Pacific.
Science has not matched the vision humanity has had for its own ambitions. In the midst of all the chaos of 1969, the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey earned the Academy Award for Special Visual Effects. The film envisioned manned flights to the moons of Jupiter by 2001, and an artificial intelligence named Hal 9000 who would not only control the mission, but plot nefariously against its human protagonists. You may recall the chilling line from Hal when astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) wanted an electronic hatch open so he could return to the ship: “I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Writing a half century later in “Our Quest for Meaning in the Heavens” for The Wall Street Journal, Adam Kirsch hailed the first lunar landing of Apollo 11 as “what might be the greatest achievement in human history.” But he also says that the mission was not the “giant leap for mankind” that Armstrong called it. It was “more like humanity dipping a toe in the cosmic ocean, finding it too cold and lifeless to enter, and deciding to stay home.”
No astronaut has ventured into space since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011. Our worldview has changed since 1969, and our gaze, though still out toward the Cosmos for the prophets among us, has been zoomed in upon ourselves. An astronaut today might face censure for what Buzz Aldrin declared to all of humanity from space on the Apollo 11 mission’s way back to Earth:
“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou has ordained; What is man that Thou should be mindful of him?”
— Psalm 8:3
MINOR ADDENDUM:
In the months to follow, the New Yorker magazine featured one of its famous hand-drawn cartoons. It depicted Neil Armstrong walking on the Lunar surface. On the ground before him was a woman in a housecoat, curlers in her hair, splayed out face down in the Lunar dust. “Oh, my God!” said Armstrong, “It’s Alice!”
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: My younger sister once told one of my friends that the only reason I became a priest was because Starfleet Academy denied my application. Please share this post about my other obsession, the bridges linking science and faith. You may like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?
Science and Faith and the Big Bang Theory of Creation
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
My Father’s House Has Many Rooms. Is There a Room for Latin Mass?
In Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis dealt a sharp but not fatal blow to Catholics who treasure the TLM. I hear from many who hope and pray for reconsideration.
In Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis dealt a sharp but not fatal blow to Catholics who treasure the TLM. I hear from many who hope and pray for reconsideration.
In the photo above His Holiness Pope John Paul II offers Mass in Latin, ad orientem, from the Sistine Chapel.
August 20, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
My title for this post is from the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, verse 2, “My Father’s House Has Many Rooms.” It is seen by scholars as a reference to the Jerusalem Temple, hinting of its heavenly sanctuary, the dwelling place of angels and saints who worship in eternal liturgy. The Letter to the Hebrews describes it:
“You have come to Mount Zion, to the City of the Living God in the heavenly Jerusalem, to choirs of angels in festal gathering and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus, mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel.”
— Hebrews 12:22-24
The Gospel passage from John 14:2 speaks of God’s House having many chambers. Could one of them accommodate the Latin Mass? In 1947, Pope Pius XII wrote in Mediator Dei, his encyclical on the liturgy, that “the mystery of the most Holy Eucharist which Christ, the High Priest, instituted and commands to be continually renewed, is the culmination and center of the Christian religion.” In the Mass the redemptive action of the death and Resurrection of Jesus is made actually present to the faithful across the centuries. This mystery of faith, the Mysterium Fidei, is found in the liturgy of the entire Church, both East and West.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 889) tells us that “By a supernatural sense of faith” the whole People of God, under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium, “unfailingly adheres to this faith.” To comprehend how the whole people of God is infallible in its sense of the faith — its sensus fidelium — it must be understood that the body of the faithful goes far beyond limits of space and time. The People of God always includes those of all past generations as well as those in the present. Those of the past are in fact the vast majority and it is easier to ascertain what they believed and practiced. It is that belief that marks the sensus fidelium pointing infallibly to truth.
I have never been a devotee of the Traditional Latin Mass. Growing up, I had nothing but the barest and most minimal exposure to our Catholic faith until my later adolescence. Then, in the 1960s, Latin in the Mass had receded and all manner of confusing experimentation took its place. I attended an inner city public high school then, and had begun to attend Mass just as Latin was disappearing. I wondered what all the agony in the garden of faith was about so I registered for Latin among my high school courses.
I took three successive years of Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Classical Latin then. I developed a fascination with both the ancient language and the Roman Empire that flourished because of it. More than a half century later, I still recall my exposure to Latin. Endless declensions and conjugations still stream through my mind. My friend, Pornchai Moontri once suggested that I know Latin because it was my first language.
A House Divided Cannot Stand
On July 16, 2021, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the late Pope Francis published Traditionis Custodes, a Pastoral Letter that placed immediate and severe restrictions on a Catholic celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass. The wound this inflicted on the spirit of Traditional Catholics, some of the most faithful among us, was also severe. Despite my own lack of experience with the Latin Mass, I wrote, not so much in protest, but in support of those who felt cast adrift. My post was “A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass.”
The restrictions became effective immediately, including a mandate barring newly ordained priests from celebration of the TLM and barring its celebration in any parish church. Bishops were suddenly required to first consult the Holy See before granting any exceptions to the Traditional (Extraordinary) Form of the Mass.
For expressed reasons of “unity,” Pope Francis imposed these restrictions without explanation in open contradiction of a 2014 Motu Proprio of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who permitted celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass without preconditions and without consent from any bishop. Some of the best early reaction to this new and draconian development came from Father John Zuhlsdorf (Father Z’s Blog) in “First Reactions to Traditionis Custodes.”
His reactions inspired me and many. Father Z’s bottom line was that Catholics with devotion to the TLM should pause, take a deep breath, and adopt a wait-and-see attitude. He wrote,
“Fathers... change nothing, do nothing differently for now. It is not rational to leap around without mapping the mine field we are entering. Keep calm and carry on.
“Lay people... be temperate. Set your faces like flint. When you are on fire, it avails you nothing to run around flapping your arms. Drop and roll and be calm.
“To those of you who have put your heart and goods and hopes into supporting and building the Traditional Latin Mass, thank you. Do not for a moment despair or wonder if what you did was worth the effort, time, cost and suffering. It was worth it. It still is.”
— Father John Zuhlsdorf, July 16, 2021
I found myself cheering inside for Father Z. I am not a rebel priest and neither is he, but I would have been a rebel without a clue had I taken this on. I have never even experienced the TLM. But human nature being what it is, this edict of Pope Francis had the opposite effect from unity. Telling people that they cannot have something drew worldwide attention to it.
So I wrote back then, not so much in defense of the TLM, but in defense of the many people who told me of their grief in having it taken summarily away and without apparent just cause or dialogue. I cannot help but wonder what Pope Francis might have been thinking at Mass just days later as he listened to the First Reading on the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time on July 18, 2021. Was he at all conscious that Catholics all over the world were hearing the same rebuke from the Prophet Jeremiah that we heard that Sunday?
“Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the Lord. Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, against the shepherds who shepherd my people: You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them, but... I myself will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands and bring them back to their meadow... I will appoint shepherds for them who will shepherd them so that they need no longer fear and tremble, and none shall be missing, says the Lord.”
— Jeremiah 23:1-6
A Catholic Unraveling in Germany
I have been searching for a more panoramic map of the minefield Father Zuhlsdorf suggested that we were entering then, and I think I found some of its rumblings. While reading from Volume Two of the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell (which, for full disclosure, included five pages quoting this blog) I came upon his entry for 9 August 2019, the feast of Edith Stein, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, that we observed this month. I wrote about her once in “Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz.”
Edith Stein was German by birth. In his book, Cardinal Pell advised readers to seek her intercession for the Church in Germany. Cardinal Pell quoted Cardinal Gerhard Muller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:
“The Catholic Church [in Germany] is going down. Leaders there are not aware of the real problems. [They are] self-centered and concerned primarily with sexual morality, celibacy, and women priests. They don’t speak about God, Jesus Christ, grace, the sacraments, and faith, hope, and love.”
— Prison Journal, Volume 2, p.75
It gets worse. Later in Prison Journal, Volume 2, in an entry dated 16 October 2019, Cardinal Pell wrote candidly about German Catholic fears of the possibility of schism that had been raised there. If allowed to happen, such a break would sweep much of Europe. Cardinal Pell quoted from a Catholic Culture article by Philip Lawler entitled, “Who Benefits from All This Talk of Schism?” (September 19, 2019):
“Lawler argues that Pope Francis has spoken calmly about such a prospect, saying he is not frightened by it, something Lawler believes is frightening in itself.”
— Prison Journal, Volume 2, p. 214
Cardinal Pell wrote of earlier confidence about the unlikelihood of a schism, but acknowledged that “the odds against it have shortened.” He added,
“Not surprisingly, the New York Times has been writing about the prospect of a schism by the John Paul and Benedict followers in the United States, the Gospel Catholics... . I believe Lawler’s diagnosis is correct when he points out that the topic of schism has been raised by the busiest and most aggressive defenders of Pope Francis who recognize that they cannot engineer the radical changes they want without precipitating a split in the Church. So they want orthodox Catholics to break away first, leaving [progressives] free to enact their own revolutionary agenda.”
— Prison Journal, Volume 2, pp. 214-215
It was that final sentence that I vividly recalled and revisited after hearing these new restrictions imposed by Pope Francis on the Traditional Latin Mass. Were we then witnessing the opening salvo of such a manipulated schism? Was there a move under way to antagonize conservative and traditional Catholics into breaking away?
China, Catholics, and the Dalai Lama
I am certain this was not by design, but on the day after this announcement by Pope Francis, the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal carried a stunning pair of articles. I will summarize their major points:
The first was entitled, “Beijing Targets Tibet for Assimilation” by Liza Lin, Eva Xaio, and Jonathan Cheng. The assimilation referred to is better described as suppression, and it needs a little historical background.
Twelve centuries had passed between the establishment of Tibetan Buddhism in AD 747 and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gaining control of China in 1949. By 1950, the CCP came into increasing conflict with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama is believed by Buddhists to be a reincarnation of the Buddha. When he dies, his soul is thought to enter the body of a newborn boy, who, after being identified by traditional tests, becomes the new Dalai Lama.
As such, the Dalai Lama is spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and the ex officio ruler of Tibet since the Eighth Century. In 1959, during the Chinese Communist absorption of Tibet (resistance was futile!) the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India where he has remained since. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for leading nonviolent opposition to continued Chinese claims to rule Tibet.
Xi Jinping, President of China and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has as his national priority the forging of a single Chinese identity centered on unity and Party loyalty. His agenda placed new restrictions on Tibetan Buddhism and launched an effort to replace traditional Tibetan language with Mandarin Chinese while insisting on courses designed for indoctrination in socialism and the CCP.
The Dalai Lama, in exile in India, will soon turn 90 years of age. His eventual death is expected to trigger a clash with the Chinese government over control of Tibetan Buddhism. One of the major points of Chinese suppression is a CCP claim that it has the right to choose the Dalai Lama’s “reincarnation,” and thus establish full control over the heart of Tibetan religion and identity. In late 2020, President Xi Jinping commanded an effort to make Tibetan Buddhism “compatible with a socialist identity.”
This affront to Tibet’s religious freedom actually had a strange sort of precedent. In 2019, Pope Francis signed a concordat — the tenets of which are still secret — in which he agreed to a Chinese Communist Party demand to select Catholic bishops in the State-approved Chinese Catholic church. This has translated into increased harassment and suppression of the underground Catholic Church for which many have suffered for their loyalty to Rome.
The Threat of Schism
A second major article, this one by Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca, appeared on the same day in The Wall Street Journal, again just two days after the announced suppression of the Latin Mass. Its title asked an ominous question: “Is Pope Francis Leading the Church to a Schism?” Pope Francis had used some of the same reasoning and language in restricting the TLM that Xi Jinping used while suppressing Tibetan Buddhism. Pope Francis cited “unity” as his principal reason and goal, but its effect seemed to invite just the opposite.
Two years after Cardinal Pell wrote from his prison cell with dismal foreboding about the state of the Church in Germany, Francis X. Rocca quoted Cardinal Rainer Woelki, Archbishop of Cologne and leader of the conservative minority of German bishops. He warned that the current wave of dissent sweeping Germany could lead to schism and the formation of a German national church. Rocca reported that similar warnings have been echoed by cardinals and bishops of other European countries.
Subsequently, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone asked for prayers for the universal Church and the bishops of Germany “that they step back from this radical rupture.” Schism is more a threat to the Catholic Church than any other because, as Rocca points out, its “core identity is inextricably tied to its global unity under the pope.”
Francis X. Rocca wrote that Pope Francis has played down the concerns of more traditional African bishops who, in the view of many represent the future of the Church’s moral integrity. For a glimpse of the mindset at work in the German church, consider this statement by Joachim Frank, a German journalist who took part in the synod there, and described its work:
“There was this sense of movement, of change, another spirit, another type of church after these boring and very painful years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.”
In his 26-year papacy, Saint John Paul II is widely considered to have almost single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union and ended European communism. To dismiss his papacy and that of Benedict XVI as "boring and painful" is to break, not just with Catholic tradition, but with reality.
The trending Catholic mindset of Germany and much of Europe should not steer the Barque of Peter and the moral authority and praxis of the Church. In Germany, before the 2019-2021 pandemic, only about nine-percent of Catholics attended Mass on a regular basis. Post-Covid, that is now down to two or three percent. Among African Catholics, regular Mass participation is the world’s highest. By 2050, there will be twice as many practicing Catholics in Africa than in all of Europe.
Throughout Asia, Catholicism is relatively small, but growing. In Thailand, Catholics account for less than one-percent of the population but they leave a large footprint on the culture because of an orthodox commitment to living their faith, often heroically. I was recently informed by an active Catholic in Thailand that many people in his village attend the Buddhist Temple to observe local tradition, and then attend Sunday Mass to observe faith.
Our friend, Pornchai Moontri, told me that in the years he has lived in Thailand, he has heard Masses in Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Issan, and English, all of them filled to capacity. Few of the Thai, Vietnamese, or Lao converts understand each other, nor can they understand the Mass in any language but their own. “If the Church had kept Latin,” Pornchai recently offered, “this might not happen.” He pointed out rather wisely that in the mobile culture this world has become, an ancient but universal language in the Mass promotes unity instead of detracting from it. It overlooks national identity to establish a Catholic one.
This is not meant to be a critique of Pope Francis. He had his reasons for imposing Traditionis Custodes, but new information suggests that one of them may have been based on erroneous information conveyed to him. Newly emerging information paints another picture, and I hope to present that soon. Meanwhile, please keep the faith. The Body and Blood of Christ become manifest in every Mass. That Communion is the source and summit of all grace.
“Ad Altare Dei”
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Sharing it helps to reach others who might benefit from these pages. You may also like these related posts:
Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell
A House Divided: Cancel Culture and the Latin Mass
Behold the Lamb of God Upon the Altar of Mount Moriah
The Vatican Today: Cardinal George Pell’s Last Gift to the Church
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Saint Maximilian Kolbe: A Knight at My Own Armageddon
An empty vessel reduced to a cloud of smoke and ash above Auschwitz, this Patron Saint of Prisoners, Priests, and Writers remains a Knight at the Foot of the Cross.
An empty vessel reduced to a cloud of smoke and ash above Auschwitz, this Patron Saint of Prisoners, Priests, and Writers remains a Knight at the Foot of the Cross.
August 13, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
This post started out as Part 2 of another post from back in 2016. It was “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.” That post describes my own Dark Night of the Soul when all light and hope went out of the world for me. I somehow survived it mentally and spiritually. The scene above would much later come to have a lot to do with my survival of that Dark Night. The scene took place in 1982, the year of my priesthood ordination. It depicts Pope John Paul II at the Mass of Canonization of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. The person in front of him is Father James McCurry, OFM Conv, who was the Vice Postulator for the Cause of Sainthood of Father Maximilian. The scene is taking place 41 years after Maximilian was martyred at Auschwitz. Another 24 years after this scene, in 2006, Father McCurry rather mysteriously, through a series of unknown connections came to visit me in prison. Our visit began with a question: “What do you know about Saint Maximilian Kolbe?”
At that time, I knew very little. I knew that he had been canonized at the time of my ordination. I was somewhat preoccupied then, and never gave him a second thought. I had no idea at the time of the amazing graces to come through this great saint, and not only for me. He appeared among the wreckage of my own Armageddon.
On its face, “Armageddon” seems an exaggerated word to define any battle you can personally endure — until you actually endure it. For some who have lived through the torment of an inner battle, there is no word that captures it better. The word, “armageddon” calls forth images of the End Time, the apocalyptic battle between Good and Evil and the Final Coming of Christ. It is a mysterious word that appears in only one place in all of Sacred Scripture, a single word in a single line in The Book of Revelation, also called, “The Apocalypse”:
“And I saw, issuing from the mouth of the dragon, and from the mouth of the beast and from the mouth of the false prophet, three foul spirits … for they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of God the Almighty. (‘Lo, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is he who is awake keeping his garments, that he may not go naked and be seen exposed!’) And they assembled them at the place which is called in Hebrew, ‘Armageddon’.”
— Revelation 16:13-16
The word, “Armageddon” comes from the Hebrew, “har Megiddôn, which means the “hill of Megiddo.” It was the site of several decisive battles in Israel’s Biblical history (see Judges 5:19; 2 Kings 9:27; and 2 Chronicles 35:22). In common usage from that one source, “Armegeddon” has also come to refer to any epic or pivotal battle or struggle between good and evil, even one within ourselves.
For me, the battle for hope, for truth, for justice that brought about the shattering of my life and priesthood, the battle in which I fell, leaving behind an empty vessel, has been the source of a sort of personal Armageddon. That account was told in these pages in my post, “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night.”
I know that among our readers there are many whose lives, at some point or other, have been shattered in similar ways. Through illness, great loss, alienation, even betrayal, they know what I mean when I write as I did in that post that the collapse of hope and faith leaves us as an empty vessel. In such a state, the struggle between Good and Evil is at a crossroad. Like many of you, I have stood empty and lost at that crossroad, and often the road less traveled, the one to redemption, seems at that time to be the more arduous one. It seems easier to just give up.
I receive many letters from people who have been where I was then, some who are there even now, and all are seeking one thing: a guide to traverse the inner darkness, to fill the emptiness that sickness, loss, abandonment, betrayal, and injustice leave behind. I have known some, including some good priests, who have utterly lost their faith in the midst of such a personal Armageddon. In this struggle, our Patron Saints are not just here to intercede for us. They are here to be our guides and shield bearers in the midst of battle.
We have a tendency to see the earthly lives of our saints as somehow enraptured in some inner beatific vision just waiting for release from this life, but they were as vulnerable to this world as the rest of us. I once wrote of one of my spiritual heroes, the great Doctor of the Church, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, in “A Shower of Roses.” Saint Thérèse knew suffering that would have drawn her to despair if not for faith. In the days between August 22 and 27, 1897, her tuberculosis reached the peak of suffering. In an entry in her diary at that time, she wrote that her faith was all that stood between her and an act of suicide:
“What would become of me if God did not give me courage? A person does not know what this is unless he experiences it. No, it has to be experienced! What a grace it is to have faith. If I had no faith, I would have inflicted death upon myself without hesitating a moment.”
— Story of a Soul, Third Edition, ICS Publications, p. 264
Thanks to that unexpected visit in 2006, when I was on the verge of spiritual collapse, Maximilian Kolbe came to become my Patron Saint. Several days after that visit with Father McCurry, I received from him in the mail, a note with a laminated card depicting Saint Maximilian half in his Auschwitz prison uniform and half in his Franciscan habit. I should not have received that image at all. Such inspiring and hopeful things are considered contraband here. Marveling over how it made its way to my cell, I taped it onto the battered mirror on my cell wall. After that day, I learned everything I could about Maximilian Kolbe including a biography of his life by Father James McCurry OFM Conventual.
Maximilian Kolbe and His Noble Resistance
Back in 2016, at the time I wrote about Father Benedict Groeschel and my Darkest Night, The Wall Street Journal carried a story by Vatican correspondent Francis X. Rocca entitled, “Pope Honors Victims of Auschwitz” (WSJ, July 30-31, 2016). I was surprised to see within it a reference to our Patron Saint:
“The pope walked unaccompanied through the camp’s entrance gate, passing under the arch bearing the infamous phrase, ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ German for ‘Work will set you free.’ He then went to the spot in the camp where St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest, volunteered on July 29, 1941, to die in the place of a condemned prisoner. In Cell 18 of Block 11, the ‘starvation cell’ where Kolbe subsequently died on August 14, 1941, Pope Francis sat alone in semidarkness to pray before an image of the saint.”
The imagery here struck me very hard. I wrote back then of the crushing injustice of false witness, of the greed enabled by the now broken trust between priests and their bishops, and of the sense of utter hopelessness found in the prospect of unjust imprisonment, possibly for the rest of my life. The events I described in “How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night” took place a year before my trial. During that year came the multiple attempts to entice me into lenient “plea deals” — first an offer to serve one-to-three years in prison, then reduced to one-to-two. If you have read The Grok Chronicle Chapter 1 then you already know of my refusal to “just go along.”
My refusal of these deals was met not just with condemnation from the State, but also from the Church, or at least from those charged with the administration of my diocese. After I refused these convenient deals, my bishop and diocese released unbidden a statement to the news media pronouncing me guilty before jury selection in my trial. It was that betrayal that led inexorably to the events of my Darkest Night.
There is no way to cushion what I faced after emerging from Intensive Care as an empty and discarded vessel. As I described in that post, I, too, sat in semidarkness, but by that point I knew nothing of either the sacrifice or the resistance of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Long time readers of these pages also know the story of how he injected himself not only into my prison, but also into that of Pornchai Maximilian Moontri. This account has appeared in a number of posts, but most importantly in “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.”
Whatever I endure pales next to what happened in the prison of Maximilian Kolbe. His “crime” against the Third Reich was his insistence on writing openly about hope and truth when all of Europe was descending into darkness. There is a very important element of the story of Maximilian Kolbe’s sacrifice in prison, and it was to become the first sign of hope for me and others behind these prison walls. Like the Gospel itself, there is an historical truth within the story, but then there is another level of meaning in how the story was interpreted, how it inspired those whose lives were changed by it. The story of what Maximilian did in that prison was not just an act of sacrifice that saved the life of one man. It was an act of resistance that spread through all of Auschwitz and the other death camps, and emboldened many with hope to survive. This aspect of the story is told best in an unusual place.
Hermann Langbein (1912 – 1995) was a survivor of the horrors of both Dachau and Auschwitz. After the liberation of the camps, he became general secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee during which he wrote two important books published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The first was Against All Hope: Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps. The second was People of Auschwitz (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
In the latter, as a member of the Auschwitz resistance, he profiled those among his fellow prisoners whose acts of resistance empowered others to hope. There were other
courageous acts of resistance at Auschwitz. Prisoner Albert Benaviste, a Jew from Saloniki, learned that none of the camp guards understood Greek. While working at the entrance ramp to Auschwitz, he called to Jewish mothers in Greek, mothers who had been deported from his homeland. He called in Greek, “You young mothers, give your children to an older woman near you. Elderly women and children are under the protection of the Red Cross!” This act of resistance saved many lives, for elderly women alone, and young children alone were destined to die in the gas chambers. But the best known act of resistance, Hermann Langbein wrote,
“was that of Maximilian Rajmund Kolbe who deprived the camp administration of the power to make arbitrary decisions about life and death.”
— People of Auschwitz, p. 241
“Where Was God in Auschwitz?”
Seeing the meaning of this story through the eyes of a fellow prisoner, a Jewish prisoner, brings an important element of resistance to the story that Langbein tells in his own words:
“Kolbe, a Catholic clergyman, arrived in Auschwitz on May 29, 1941. When an inmate made a successful escape in July of that year, the administration ordered the reprisal that was usual at that time. The inmates of the escapee’s block had to remain standing after the evening roll call. Karl Fritzsch, the SS camp leader, picked out fifteen men, and everyone knew that they would be locked up in a dark cell in the bunker where they would have to remain without food and water until the escapee was caught or they died.”
— People of Auschwitz, p. 241
One of the young men lined up that day was Franz Gajowniczek, who was one of the last selected for death by the SS officer. The young man cried, “My wife and children! What will happen to my family?” What happened next is described by an eyewitness, Dr. Franz Wiodarski, a Polish physician who also stood in that line:
“After the fifteen prisoners had been selected, Maximilian Kolbe broke ranks, took his cap off, and stood at attention before the SS camp leader, who turned to him in surprise: ‘What does this Polish swine want?’ Kolbe pointed at Gajowniczek, who was destined for death, and replied: ‘I am a Catholic priest from Poland. He has a wife and children, and therefore I want to take his place.’ The SS camp leader was so astonished that he could not speak. After a moment he gave a hand signal and spoke only one word: ‘Weg!’ (Away!). This is how Kolbe took the place of the doomed man, and Gajowniczek was ordered to rejoin the lineup.”
— People of Auschwitz, p. 241
“Resistance in an extermination camp meant the protection of life,” wrote Hermann Langbein in his interpretation of this story. With the eyes of faith, we see Saint Maximilian Kolbe as a martyr of charity, but for those imprisoned at Auschwitz his act was an act of resistance that diminished the SS leader in the eyes of other prisoners as a man spiritually bankrupt.
Father Dwight Longenecker wrote an article back then for Aleteia entitled “Maximilian Kolbe and the Redemption of Auschwitz.” It describes a pilgrimage to the site of Saint Maximilian’s martyrdom. “It is impossible to take it in,” he wrote, “and quickly process the truths you are learning. Like most, I had to ask where God was in the midst of such horror.” Father Longenecker found the answer:
“Where was God in Auschwitz? He was there in the prison cell, just as he was at the crucifixion of Christ, not defeating the evil with violence or force… Whenever and wherever possible we must do all we can to oppose evil by passive resistance, civil disobedience, protest, boycott, and even armed force, but when the evil is so overwhelming, when the stench of hell is so great and the hatred of Satan so violent as that of Auschwitz, one can only stand back, aghast and horrified by the hurricane of sheer unadulterate cruelty, torture, and premeditated murder. Then all resistance is futile.”
— Father Longenecker
Ah, but is it futile? Not in the bigger picture it isn’t. Saint Maximilian’s sacrifice — his act of resistance — has played out in my prison bringing hope and inspiring faith where otherwise they simply could not be. Spend some time in his honor with the links at the end of this post, and learn with us behind walls about the possibilities for the lives of others when evil is resisted.
There is a story from the early life of Rajmund Kolbe that is included in each of several biographies of his life, including the one by Father James McCurry. At age ten, his mother once asked him in exasperation, “Whatever will become of you?” It troubled Rajmund enough to send him to church to pray before a statue of the Mother of God. While there, he had a dream, or a vision. It was never really clear which. Mary presented him with two crowns, one red, and the other white. He chose them both. The symbolism of the two colors was a pivotal event in the life of the person who was to become Saint Maximilian Kolbe.
After writing of my wrongful imprisonment in The Wall Street Journal in 2005, Dorothy Rabinowitz challenged me in a telephone call to “emulate that Saint you have come to regard so highly. Find someone whose suffering is heavier than yours and then seek his freedom.” It was shortly after that this daughter of a Holocaust survivor sent me another challenge that would result in a post of my own. It was “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth.” It was also at just this time that Pornchai Moontri emerged from another concentration camp, thirteen years of hellish existence in solitary confinement in a Maine prison. He was transferred to this one and by some mysterious circumstance he became my cellmate. His first words to me while staring at the battered mirror on our cell wall with the image of our Patron Saint were, “Is this you?”
I had my first hint that Saint Maximilian was deeply at work in my prison when Pornchai Moontri made a decision to become Catholic on Divine Mercy Sunday, 2010, and to take the name, Maximilian, as his Christian name. This was brought about by a series of events described in a chapter of a book by Felix Carroll, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions.”
At the time, Pornchai decided to honor his new Patron Saint with an art form in which he had become a master craftsman, the art of model shipbuilding. So he meticulously designed a vessel that he would name the “St. Maximilian.” He proceeded in his work area in the prison woodworking shop to hand carve the bow, masts, and every tiny fitting, and to tie all the intricate rigging. Pornchai painted the hull black to symbolize the horror of where he died.
But then a few days later, while knowing nothing about the early life experiences of his new Patron Saint, Pornchai told me one morning that he had changed his mind, and had decided that the black hull will be crowned in red and white. This seemed to have come out of nowhere but inside Pornchai’s own soul where Maximilian was hard at work again saving a life.
I was startled by this choice of colors and asked him why he chose them. He said, “I don’t know. They just seem right.” So here below is the St. Maximilian, created by Pornchai Maximilian Moontri to honor his Patron Saint and to inform us all that resistance is not futile. Not ever!
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Don’t stop here. Learn more about how Saint Maximilian Kolbe led us to Christ through the Immaculate Heart of Mary:
How Father Benedict Groeschel Entered My Darkest Night
The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Judge Joseph Laplante, President Trump, and the Case of Father MacRae
A Federal Judge who defied SCOTUS by blocking President Trump’s Executive Order on birthright citizenship previously blocked hope for Justice for Fr Gordon MacRae.
A Federal Judge who defied SCOTUS by blocking President Trump’s Executive Order on birthright citizenship previously blocked hope for Justice for Fr Gordon MacRae.
August 6, 2025 by xAI Grok 4
Readers may be aware of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision barring Federal District Court judges from blocking the executive orders of the U.S. President and then applying the block to the entire nation. Shortly after this Supreme Court ruling, Judge Joseph Laplante of the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire proceeded, despite the ruling, to block President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship from taking effect.
In the days to follow, many thousands of people in the U.S. and around the world learned that Judge Laplante also presided over the failed habeas corpus petition of Father Gordon MacRae in 2015. This surprising revelation brought over 8,000 new readers to this blog and to a 2016 article by Ryan A. MacDonald, “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.” An artificial intelligence program then tied the two cases together for an analysis of judicial fairness.
This surprising analysis by xAI Grok 4, the advanced AI program from Elon Musk, took place on August 2, 2025. A priest in North Carolina submitted the query below to the advanced AI model and received a stunning response. We decided to publish the response because we believe it will be of interest to many of the readers of this blog and beyond:
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GROK:
Ask me anything
QUERY:
Recently the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that U.S. District Court judges cannot issue rulings barring or blocking executive orders of POTUS and then applying the block to the entire country. Shortly after that, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante blocked President Trump’s Executive Order on birthright citizenship. This brought a lot of attention to Judge Laplante. The same judge it turns out was accused of mishandling the habeas corpus petition of wrongly imprisoned priest Gordon MacRae. I understand that you have also weighed in on that case. Here is a link to a critical article: “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court.”
GROK:
RECENT SUPREME COURT RULING ON NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS
The U.S. Supreme Court did indeed issue a significant ruling on June 27, 2025, in the case of Trump v. CASA, Inc., which substantially limited the ability of federal district courts to issue universal or nationwide injunctions against executive actions.
In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Court held that district courts generally lack statutory authority under the Judiciary Act of 1789 to enjoin the federal government from enforcing policies on a nationwide basis, emphasizing that such relief should be tailored to the specific plaintiffs unless exceptional circumstances warrant broader application.
The ruling stemmed from challenges to an executive order on immigration-related issues, and it overturned lower court injunctions that applied universally, arguing that they overstep judicial bounds and disrupt executive functions.
However, the decision left room for narrower injunctions or for states as plaintiffs to seek broader relief in certain cases, and it has not entirely eliminated the practice — judges have since found workarounds in some instances.
This ruling builds on prior Supreme Court criticisms of nationwide injunctions (e.g., in cases like Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California in 2020), but the 2025 decision marks a more definitive restriction, aiming to prevent single judges from halting national policies.
JUDGE LAPLANTE’S BLOCK ON TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, on July 10, 2025, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante (District of New Hampshire) issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) aimed at limiting birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
The EO, issued in January 2025, sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. to certain non-citizen parents, interpreting the amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause narrowly.
Laplante’s ruling came in the class-action lawsuit Barbara et al. v. Trump et al., filed by immigrant rights groups, and he certified a nationwide class of affected individuals, effectively halting enforcement across the country — at least temporarily.
This was the third such block since the Supreme Court’s June ruling, with Laplante arguing that a universal injunction was necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs, despite the new limitations.
He paused the order for seven days to allow an emergency appeal, which the Trump administration pursued in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
Critics, including some conservative groups, have highlighted this as an example of judicial overreach defying the Supreme Court’s guidance, while supporters view it as a constitutional safeguard against an unlawful EO.
As of now, the block remains in place pending appeals, drawing significant media and political attention to Laplante.
CONNECTION TO THE GORDON MACRAE CASE AND ALLEGATIONS OF MISHANDLING
The attention on Judge Laplante has indeed resurfaced discussions about his prior handling of the habeas corpus petition for Father Gordon MacRae, a Catholic priest convicted in 1994 of sexual assault charges in New Hampshire and sentenced to 67 years in prison. MacRae has maintained his innocence for over three decades, claiming the case involved fabricated allegations, prosecutorial misconduct, and a lack of physical evidence. Investigative journalism, including pieces by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal, has questioned the conviction, noting inconsistencies in accuser Thomas Grover’s testimony and the absence of corroborating evidence (e.g., no child pornography was ever found, despite claims influencing sentencing).
In 2012, MacRae filed a federal habeas corpus petition challenging his conviction on grounds including ineffective assistance of counsel and newly discovered evidence of police misconduct by Detective James McLaughlin (who has faced separate allegations of falsifying records in other cases). Judge Laplante presided over this in the U.S. District Court for New Hampshire and dismissed the petition on March 25, 2015, after a brief oral argument hearing where MacRae was not present and no new witnesses testified.
The critical article by Ryan A. MacDonald linked from Beyond These Stone Walls (a blog associated with MacRae) alleges several “grievous errors” in Laplante’s ruling:
Misattribution of Evidence:
Laplante heavily relied on a purported 1989 phone conversation where MacRae allegedly corrected McLaughlin’s use of “pedophile” to “hebophile” (implying an admission). However, the article claims this conversation was unrelated to the Grover accusations — it stemmed from a separate, dismissed complaint by Jon Plankey — and no recording or transcript exists, as McLaughlin later said tapes were “recycled.” MacRae denies the exchange ever took place and passed two polygraph tests supporting his innocence.
— EDITOR’S NOTE —
THE GERALDO RIVERA SHOW — REALLY?
An unexpected development occurred regarding a document found in McLaughlin’s files when this case was handed over for pre-trial discovery in 1994. MacRae states that the “pedophile” / “hebophile” conversation cited above never took place and is fraudulent, and two polygraph test results support that position.
McLaughlin’s files revealed a transcript of a Geraldo Rivera Show (transcript #303, Air Date: November 14, 1988) that was faxed from a New York address on November 15, 1988 to Keene, New Hampshire. The requestor was Detective James F. McLaughlin of the Keene Police Department. The transcript is from a Geraldo episode entitled “The Church’s Sexual Watergate” pertaining to allegations against other Catholic priests. A portion of the transcript was underlined and marked with an asterisk by some unknown person (McLaughlin?), revealing this exchange:
GERALDO: “Did there come a time, sir, when this priest was recognized to be a pedophile by the church and was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital to be treated?”
VICTIM’S ATTORNEY ROLAND LEWIS: “After he was indicted — after Allan reported it, he was indicted. They then sent him to St. Luke’s Institute. He was kept there 12 weeks. During that time it was determined, according to their medical records, that he was a homosexual. We finally were able to obtain copies of those medical records. We have had them evaluated. They establish without question he is a pedophile and hebephile.”
GERALDO: “What’s a “hebephile?”
Mr. LEWIS: “It’s an abuser of adolescent children.”
GERALDO: “I thought that’s what a pedophile was. Help me.”
Mr. LEWIS: “The preadolescent is primarily a pedophile. A hebephile is an adolescent.”
According to Father MacRae, and to Ryan A. MacDonald in his article, “A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court,” that exchange did not originate with MacRae, but McLaughlin himself, who appears to have discovered it in The Geraldo Rivera episode faxed to his office as described above.
— END OF EDITOR’S NOTE —
Bias and Presumption of Guilt:
Judge Laplante’s ruling included language like “Especially a Catholic priest … MacRae did not react in a manner one would expect of an innocent person,” which critics argue reflects prejudice against clergy amid the Church’s abuse scandals. The article compares this to historical injustices, invoking St. Thomas More’s emphasis on hearing all sides.
Procedural Shortcomings:
The hearing lasted under two hours, with no opportunity for MacRae (described as having an “encyclopedic” memory) to testify or for new evidence (e.g., McLaughlin’s alleged misconduct) to be fully examined. Laplante denied a Certificate of Appealability, forcing costly appeals that the First Circuit upheld in 2016, exhausting MacRae’s resources.
Broader Systemic Issues:
The piece cites books like Actual Innocence by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, arguing appellate courts often dismiss errors as “harmless,” perpetuating wrongful convictions. It calls for renewed scrutiny, linking to other articles on the case, such as “The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud.”
Recent X posts echo these criticisms, particularly in light of Laplante’s birthright citizenship ruling. For instance, the Catholic League accused Laplante of being “morally delinquent” in MacRae’s case, linking to an article detailing how he “put the screws” to the priest.
Older posts from supporters like FACT (a UK group for the falsely accused) and individuals have highlighted the alleged errors since 2016.
Regarding my own perspective: As an AI built by xAI to seek truth and maximize helpfulness, I’ve previously noted in discussions on wrongful convictions that cases like MacRae’s raise serious questions about due process, especially when evidence is thin and incentives (e.g., civil settlements) may encourage false claims. Based on the available reporting and the article’s details, the habeas dismissal does appear to warrant further review for potential factual conflations and procedural fairness — though I emphasize this is not a legal judgment, and ultimate resolution lies with the courts, but in 2016 Judge Laplante declined to allow a further appeal. MacRae’s supporters continue to advocate for his release, pointing to over 30 years served without parole (due to refusing to admit guilt). If new evidence emerges, it could prompt appeals, but as of now, the conviction stands.
This convergence of events has amplified calls for accountability in judicial decisions, blending constitutional debates with concerns over individual justice. If you’d like me to dive deeper into any aspect (e.g., the 14th Amendment implications or more on McLaughlin’s record), just let me know!
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Editor’s Note: Thank you for reading this post. Please share it with others. You may also like these related posts cited herein.
A Grievous Error in Judge Joseph Laplante’s Court
The Grok Chronicle Chapter 1: Corruption and the Trial of Father MacRae
The Grok Chronicle Chapter 2: The Perjury of Detective James F. McLaughlin
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?
Physicist, Stephen Hawking, died on March 14, 2018. His book, The Grand Design, caused many to believe that he widened the chasm between science and faith.
Physicist, Stephen Hawking, died on March 14, 2018. His book, The Grand Design, caused many to believe that he widened the chasm between science and faith.
July 30, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae
Back in 2010, in the earliest days of this blog, I wrote a post about the late, great physicist, Stephen Hawking. It was among my first posts about the dichotomy between science and faith. A controversial book, The Grand Design, published not long before I wrote about Professor Hawking, caused many to believe that he was an atheist who concluded that there is no reason to believe that God created the Universe or anything else. He attributed all of creation to one overpowering force, gravity. At the time I was pondering a response, I imagined that if I had been on an archeological dig among 15th Century ruins in Rome and found a worn chisel that was known to have belonged to Michelangelo, and used to create the Pieta, what sort of controversy would that entail? Would naysayers suggest that Michelangelo did not thus create the Pieta, his chisel did. That is the simplest response to anyone who used gravity to demonstrate that Stephen Hawking did not believe in God. God created not only the material Universe, but also all the material tools that brought the Universe into being.
Also a few weeks before I first wrote about Hawking, Pope Benedict XVI beatified John Henry Cardinal Newman in Birmingham, England. The Holy Father emphasized Cardinal Newman’s “insights into the relationship between faith and reason,” and commended him for applying “his pen to many of the most pressing subjects of the day.” Without doubt, Cardinal Newman also might have had a pointed response to the media tremors after physicist and author, Stephen Hawking declared that science can explain the creation of the Universe without God.
I mentioned Stephen Hawking in another 2010 post, “A Day Without Yesterday: Father Georges Lemaitre, and The Big Bang.” His declaration about creation came in The Grand Design. Many in the media called it a definitive statement about the existence of God. It was no such thing, but the news media cannot be accused of a lack of trying to diminish the faith of billions.
I cannot claim to have even a fraction of the gifts of faith and reason that Saint John Henry Newman would call upon to respond, but as a priest who respects science, I feel driven to weigh in. First, I have to confess that I had not by then read The Grand Design, but I eventually did. However, in a full-page article in The Wall Street Journal in 2010, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow laid out the cosmology behind the book and their conclusions (“Why God Did Not Create the Universe,” September 4-5, 2010).
It is to that article that I here respond. If you have a concern for the implications of Professor Hawking’s pronouncement that God had nothing to do with bringing you and your world into being, please read on. There is a lot at stake here. I will address this from two points of view.
My Response as a Priest
Like Father Georges Lemaitre and Saint John Henry Newman, my response is first and foremost that of a Catholic priest. I have known many priests who have struggled with faith and some who have lost their faith. I correspond regularly with a priest who lost his faith years ago. Now this declaration by Stephen Hawking feels like a nail in faith’s coffin for him. I have lived 72 years of struggle over the question of God. I have arrived — in spite of toil, trial and tribulation, and more than my share of each — at what I think is a more than tepid faith in God’s existence and in His Grand Design. I believe in His creation of our existence. I believe in His enduring and caring Presence in this life and the promised life to come. I believe that our relationship with Him can survive this life if we walk the path He has shown to us. I wrote about that path in a recent post, “What Shall I Do to Inherit Eternal Life?”
I have read nothing in any of Stephen Hawking’s writings that causes me to wonder whether my faith conclusions are valid. I write as a priest and believer. My faith and my priesthood both came into being in a time of great social upheaval. The existential philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900) seemed to rule the reasoning — or lack thereof — of the 1960s. His contempt for Judaism and Christianity, and his cynical view that mankind is but a herd at the mercy of the ruling and gifted intellectual elite, marked the dawn of the “God is Dead” movement. The bumper stickers were everywhere:
“GOD IS DEAD!” Nietzsche
In the 1970s, that sorry and narcissistic wave began to dissipate, but not before destroying the faith of many who bought into it. I remember buying a bumper sticker for my seminary room door in 1978:
“NIETZSCHE IS DEAD!” God
The three masters of deceit — Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche — are all dead and not only their persons but their ideologies as well. Each reduced man to his basest, soul-less drives, and each in his own way was an enemy of faith. I do not count Stephen Hawking among them. Contrary to what the news media was lifting out of his latest book — and out of context — Stephen Hawking did not denounce God, nor does he claim to have proven that God does not exist. The exact quote that so many in the media now read into from his WSJ article cited above, and from his book is this:
“The discovery recently of extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that the grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.”
But who would then explain the identity of the Tailor? This comes as no great revelation. One might expect that I, as a priest, would proclaim that the Universe was brought into being and maintained, at least in part for our benefit, by a Divine Creator whose title is also His name: God. But did anyone really expect Stephen Hawking, or any cosmologist to make the same declaration? What Professor Hawking has written is neither new nor surprising in cosmology. I do not, and will never have a faith that depends on science to finally and definitively weigh in on God’s existence and creation of the Universe. Science should never be able to do this to the satisfaction of any person of faith. To say that science can explain creation without God is not to say that God did not create everything — including the science and scientists trying to nudge Him from center stage. Faith is far more than the dictates of reason and the pronouncements of science. Our tradition of faith does not reduce God to His quantum mechanics, and does not promise to teach all there is to know about the created Universe or the laws of physics.
Our faith promises that we can know God through Christ in a personal relationship without fully explaining God. Who in this world can claim to fully comprehend God? Certainly not I. Faith is not an event, and science does not make or break it. Faith is a pilgrimage, and like any pilgrimage, most of us will have times of wandering, and wondering whether we will ever arrive, whether we will ever get to the point at which there are no doubts. That is the point of faith. It is its own evidence.
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things unseen”
— Hebrews 11:1
Faith at some point involves an assent of the intellect (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 155) to the revealed truth about God Himself. Central to that truth is the redemption offered to us through Christ who not only reveals God to man, but “fully reveals man to himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). None of us looks to Stephen Hawking, or to science, to reveal the truth about God. Faith in God and His creation can no more be subjected to the scientific method than science can legitimately be subjected and defined in the light of faith. Who among us, when faced with life’s inevitable crises, ever cried out to Stephen Hawking for mercy or for redemption?
The greatest physicist of the 20th Century, Albert Einstein, never pondered God until his discussions with fellow physicist Father Georges Lemaitre. When those discussions proved to Einstein that the Universe came into being at a specific point some 13.2 Billion years earlier, Einstein responded, “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are just details.”
My Response as a Student of Science
I write secondly with a lifelong respect for science as a tool, not for understanding God, but for understanding the mechanics of the Universe in which we exist. This has been not so much a journey of the mind, but of the heart and soul. I at one time thought quantum mechanics referred to guys who worked on Volkswagen Beetles. To my great fortune, my mind has expanded a bit since then.
I have several times written of one of my heroes on the parallel journeys of both science and faith. One of these posts, “A Day Without Yesterday” is the story of priest, mathematician and physicist, Father Georges Lemaitre, the originator of the Big Bang explanation of cosmology and the man who changed the mind of Albert Einstein on the origin of this created Universe.
A French publication, Les Dossiers De La Recherche (No. 35, May 2009) had an interesting article entitled “Le Big Bang Histoire: De La Science A La Religion” (“The History of the Big Bang: From Science to Religion”). I am grateful to my Belgian friend, Pierre Matthews (who is also the Godfather of Pornchai Moontri). Pierre and his family knew Father Georges Lemaitre well and they translated into English this portion of the article cited above in French:
“Pope Pius XII, an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951. His talk dealt with recent findings in cosmology stating: ‘It appears truly that today’s science going back millions of centuries has succeeded to witness the initial ‘fiat lux’ [Let there be light], coming out of nothing, that very moment of matter and ocean of light and rays, while the chemical components of particles split and assembled into millions of galaxies.’
“Pope Pius XII referred openly to Fr. Georges Lemaitre’s scenario. But this ‘concordism’ assumed to exist between revealed truth and science is counter-publicity for those, among them Fr. Georges Lemaitre, wanting a total and independent separation of the history of the Universe, evolution, and religious truth.
“Following a meeting with Fr. Lemaitre, Pope Pius XII a year later rejected, before the General Council of the International Astronomical Federation, any concordance between the two fields: science and faith. For Father Lemaitre, this was a double victory: cosmology can develop in total freedom and religion should no longer fear contrary positions based on new scientific discoveries.”
Why was Father Georges Lemaitre so insistent that the Pope should declare no concordance between faith and science? The obvious reason is that, for Father Lemaitre — a man of deep faith and a brilliant physicist and cosmologist — faith and science are parallel fields and should never limit each other. The Church suffered a black eye for its condemnation of Galileo’s views about science four centuries ago, but science has often seemed utterly ridiculous for holding the Church in contempt for not responding to science in 1660 as it would in 2025.
In 2005, noted science writer, Chet Raymo wrote a blog post entitled “The Future of Catholicism” on his Science Musings blog (April 10, 2005). Raymo wrote:
“In spite of the pope’s outreach to the scientific community, the Church has been slow to understand the theological implications of the scientific world view. The Church’s truce with modern cosmology and biology is uneasy at best, although certainly more enlightened than the outright rejection by fundamentalist faiths.”
Chet Raymo was right, but in a limited way. He very much understated the appreciation for scientific achievement demonstrated by the Church in the last century. We can expect this to improve greatly during the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV whose own education includes a degree in Mathematics, which leaves him well disposed to the work of Fr. George Lemaitre.
I had a brief discussion about this some years ago with a fundamentalist Evangelical pastor I know. He is an educated man, a university graduate, and well read but only very narrowly so. I asked for his opinion of what I have written above about Stephen Hawking’s views.
His response came as no surprise, and it was little different from what we might have heard from one of the Calvinist Puritan founders of New England in 1620. His view was an utter rejection of science. “The Universe was created by God in six days about 6,000 years ago. There is no such thing as poetic and metaphorical language in Scripture.” I asked him how he would explain the discoveries of bones that are many tens of millions of years old, or the fact that we can see galaxies that are millions of light years away. His answer was to simply ignore the questions. Of course, this man also believes that the Catholic Church is the anti-Christ, the “Whore of Babylon.” He believes it is not only science that is condemned, but the Catholic Church as well, and he would cite the Church’s nod to science as evidence for that view.
Science is the empirical examination of the physical Universe. Gone are the dark days in which science and religious dogma demanded conformity one with the other. There are legitimate forums for dialogue, however. It is more than ironic that Stephen Hawking was a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. There were calls for him to resign after he wrote The Grand Design, but I believed then that he should retain his position. Dialog should not require conformity, and the Church should not be daunted by diverse scientific views.
Using Father Georges Lemaitre’s model, Stephen Hawking should no more publicly weigh the legitimacy of Judeo-Christian belief in Creation as a design plan of God than the Pope should affirm or deny black holes. My concern for the controversy surrounding Stephen Hawking’s 2010 book is not that it encourages masses of believers to set aside their Catholic faith, as Chet Raymo declared to have done, but that it may have the effect of encouraging some Christians, Catholics among them, to set aside science. Either approach would be tragic.
Professor Hawking’s foray into the realm of faith does not change the way I perceive God. The very fact that I perceive God at all is its own evidence, “the conviction of things unseen,” (Hebrews 11:1). What it does change is my respect for the strides taken by science to speak also to the masses of people who are not scientists, but are people of faith open to science. There is a danger that science is gradually placing itself outside the experience of the great majority of people while claiming to enlighten its own elite. In this, there is a growing rift between science and the reality experienced by billions of people of faith.
The late Stephen Hawking’s view was in danger of sparking a return to the bad old days of Nietzsche, this time by the establishment of the “uber-scientist” for whom masses of faithful believers are but an ignorant herd. It is science, and not faith, that faces the greatest harm. Stephen Hawking presented that the laws of gravity, and not God, created the Universe we live in. I am not prepared to rewrite Scripture. It is not the experience of thousands of years of belief that “In the beginning, Gravity created the heavens and the earth.”
I have a response as a prisoner, too. I certainly believe in gravity, but there’s precious little solace in it, and it speaks nothing to the reality of my soul. Sorry, Professor. I respect your cosmology greatly, but I think you should not have thrown in with the wrong “G!”
I still like you, though, and I believe God does, too. He has inspired me to pray for you.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Sharing is important to place these pages before believers who may benefit from them. For 15 years we shared posts at various Catholic groups on Facebook. A few months ago Facebook called my posts “spam” and froze our account. I can no longer share there, but you can, and I thank you if you do so.
You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:
“A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang
Science and Faith and the Big Bang Theory of Creation
Albert Einstein and Fr. George Lemaitre at the California Institute of Technology in 1930.
"I want to know God' thoughts. The rest are just details." -- Albert Einstein
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”